Honeybee Spermatozoa and their Survival in the Queen's Spermatheca

A queen honeybee mates with a number of drones when she is a few days old, and for the rest of her life she can normally lay eggs that are fertilized with sperms from one or other of these drones. The question has been in many people's minds: how do these sperms remain in the queen's spermatheca for years on end, alive but inactive, and what activates them after they are released, so that they are then able to enter an egg?Dr. Verma sets out the steps by which recent research work has unravelled the complicated life of drone spermatozoa. He finishes with a short account of his own experiments and arguments, which together provide a likely answer to the questions: how are the spermatozoa able to survive, and how are they able to be effective after their long and crowded storage?