A group of British researchers recently discovered that they could tell the “life stories” of bees by using radar technology to track their every flight, from birth to death. This experiment draws on the work of (and would have likely delighted) Karl von Frisch, who devoted his life to understanding the inner world of bees. Emily Dickinson wrote that
Here, Tania Munz seeks to illuminate this “experience” by exploring the complicated life and work of Frisch.
The Dancing Bees is unusual in that it is a dual biography. It tells the story of Frisch, a German zoologist who learned of his Jewish ancestry well into World War II while teaching at the University of Munich. Faced with the prospect of losing his livelihood—and possibly his life—Frisch managed to rally friends and colleagues to advocate on behalf of his bee research and to insist upon his devotion to the Reich. Unlike many Jewish scientists, Frisch managed to keep his position and continued to work, largely for the Nazi government, until the war’s end.
But Frisch is not the main focus. Munz seems reluctant to speculate or cast judgment on his character, challenges, or personal life. Instead, the book centers on bees—as Munz calls them, Frisch’s “ideal organisms.” The Dancing Bees serves primarily as a history of the world’s changing attitude toward bees, and an examination of Frisch’s own perspective on his favorite insects.
Karl von Frisch never stopped wanting to know everything he could on the subject. In 1946, as the world was still absorbing the impact of war, he wrote excitedly to a friend about his “sensational findings” regarding bee language: “[If] you now think I’m crazy, you’d be wrong. But I could certainly understand it.” After years of studying how bees perceived color, sensed direction, and distinguished among the scents of different flowers, he was certain he had discovered the way bees “talked” through their dances.
This decoding was the result of decades of painstaking analysis and came centuries after bee dances were first observed. As Munz points out, Aristotle had made note of their strange dance formations, and beekeepers had long wondered what they might mean. But Munz asks the book’s central question: “How . . . did von Frisch manage to observe such behaviors where others for centuries had looked but failed to see?”
The answer may reveal why Frisch was so fascinated by bees: It is possible that he saw something of himself in the single-minded, yet creative and colorful insects. In his autobiography, he explained how, as a child, he “discovered that miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passer-by sees nothing at all.” And he appears never to have lost his conviction that miracles were waiting to be revealed in the world of the patient—indeed, tireless—bee.
But his conclusions changed significantly over time. In 1923, Frisch wrote that the two distinct bee dances, known as the “round dance” and “waggle dance,” communicated information about nectar or pollen sources, respectively. But by 1946, he had changed this view. He wrote and spoke widely on his carefully constructed experiments, based on many thousands of observations involving measuring the location of food sources relative to beehives in varied environments and counting the number of times bees waggled or spun around. Ultimately, he concluded that bees used their sense of direction, based on the angle of the sun, to communicate the distance and direction of food sources.
Despite repeating his experiments, he remained “unable to comprehend this ability of the bees.” Possibly more remarkable than the revelation that bees could communicate distance and direction was his discovery that they could communicate about complicated routes or “shortcuts” as well. If bees discovered a food source after flying around a mountain, they would communicate the distance and direction of the direct route to the food rather than the circuitous route they had taken. Other bees would then fly directly to the source. But if bees had to fly up a mountain and then down a ridge to reach a food source, they would communicate the actual distance flown, the necessary distance to reach the source.
These conclusions stunned a scientific world that had moved away from viewing animals with any sense of wonder. Munz quotes a variety of early bee enthusiasts: from Charles Darwin, who declared that it is “a dull man who can examine the exquisite structure of a comb, so beautifully adapted to its end, without enthusiastic admiration,” to the 18th-century mathematician Colin Maclaurin, who wrote of the honeycomb that what “is most beautiful and regular, is also found to be most useful and excellent.” The philosopher Thomas Reid took the geometric precision of bees as proof of “the great Geometrician, who made the bee.”
By contrast, mid-20th-century American scientists trained in behaviorism, such as the biologist Adrian Wenner, were not impressed by Frisch’s findings—or by bees in general: “The discovery of [a] remarkable event among animals,” he wrote, “will find a ready acceptance in a basically optimistic audience.” But he insisted that Frisch’s interpretation of bees was anthropomorphic. Behaviorists insisted that bees were simple stimulus-response organisms, and that any attempt to decode a language based on their behavior was both fanciful and pointless.
Despite these criticisms, Frisch’s experiments were successfully repeated innumerable times, and his findings were vindicated. Munz outlines the tensions among various scientific ideologies and hints at the danger of politicizing research. She also illuminates the marvelous, seemingly random, tightly controlled world of bees, and in so doing, provides some insight into Frisch’s own character, the careful scientist creating sensations through vigilant, precise, unending work.
Devorah Goldman is an assistant editor at National Affairs.
