The dance of the European honey bee (Apis mellifera), in which the bees waggle their abdomens while repeatedly tracing out an intricate figure-of-eight pattern, was already observed in the ancient world, but the man who finally worked out its mysterious meaning was the unconventionally minded Austrian researcher Karl von Frisch. Frisch's revolutionary discovery at first earned scorn and ridicule from other mid-twentieth-century scientists, but in the end it won him the Nobel Prize.

As a schoolboy, Karl would often slip away from lessons to spend time in the company of his more than one hundred living creatures; only nine of the inhabitants of this menagerie were mammals. His favourite companion was a small Brazilian parrot named Tschoki, who accompanied Frisch everywhere – sitting in his lap or on his shoulder, and even sleeping beside his bed. Together with Tschoki, Frisch would spend hours out of doors, simply watching nature. He later wrote of this: “I discovered that wondrous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passer-by sees nothing at all.”

Frisch began studying bees in 1912. Contrary to the prevailing view of the time, he had come to suspect that the bees' waggle dance was a kind of language. In advancing such a hypothesis, he challenged two fundamental assumptions of Western science and philosophy – that complex language belongs to humans alone, and that insects, on account of their minuscule brains, are incapable of sophisticated forms of communication.

Human verbal language rests for the most part on the noises we make with our vocal cords and mouths, on facial expression, and on posture and gesture. The language of bees, by contrast, is primarily spatial and expressed through vibration. Its syntax is founded on something very different from human language – on the variation, frequency, angles and amplitude that characterise the vibrations bees produce with their bodies, including the abdomen and the wings, as they move through space.

By buzzing and quivering, bowing and turning, bees pass on remarkably precise information to one another. When a scout bee has found a good source of food, it returns to the hive to report it to its sisters. Performing the waggle dance, the bee moves along a figure of eight – in a straight line, moving its wings, and then back along an arc, this time without beating the wings. We now know that this danced-out pattern, easy to follow with the eye, encodes the direction of the food source relative to the position of the sun in the sky, while the duration of the dance indicates the distance the bees will have to travel.

Frisch devised an ambitious experiment – to track thousands of individual bees in order to analyse the relationships between their dances and particular food sources. At the time this seemed impossible, given that a hive is home to between 10,000 and 40,000 bees. Yet thanks to a meticulously scrupulous attention to detail and near-inexhaustible reserves of patience, Frisch managed to prove his hypothesis: as it waggles, the bee leading the dance orients its body in a specific way relative to gravity and to the position of the sun. Through subtle variations in the duration, speed and intensity of the dance, a bee can give precise instructions about the direction, distance and quality of a source of nectar. In this way it instructs the other bees of the hive, which use the information gained from the dance to reach a source of nectar they have never once visited before.

Frisch's research demonstrated, by ever greater degrees, the astonishing precision of the bees' communication system. In one of his most famous experiments, he trained his bees to seek out a hidden food source several kilometres away – on the far shore of a lake, beyond a hill. This was a remarkable achievement, given that Frisch had shown the place only once, and only to a single bee. In another experiment he demonstrated that bees in different hives have slightly different dance steps. To all appearances, bees learn their style of dancing from their hive-mates. In essence, you could say that the language of honey bees has dialects, just as different human communities do.

Frisch himself was so taken aback by these findings that at first he disclosed them to no one. Contrary to the prevailing scientific view, they showed clearly that bees possess the ability to learn, to remember and to share information by means of symbolic communication, a kind of abstract language. In 1946 he wrote to a confidant: “If you were now to think me mad, you would be mistaken. But I would understand you entirely.”

Frisch's misgivings were entirely justified. When he finally published the results of his research, many scientists rejected them, objecting that insects with such tiny brains are incapable of complex forms of communication. The American biologist Adrian Wenner publicly disputed Frisch's theory; his view that bees find their food chiefly by following scents later proved mistaken, although scents are indeed important signals for bees. Over the years Frisch's conclusions were fully confirmed by experiments conducted independently of him, and in 1973 he received the Nobel Prize. In closing its announcement of the nomination, the prize committee noted the “brazen conceit” of Homo sapiens in refusing to acknowledge the extraordinary capacities of bees.

Speaking of the dances of honey bees, Frisch called them a “magic well”: the more he studied them, the more intricate they turned out to be. Every species of living creature has its own magic well, Frisch maintained. Humans have verbal language. Whales have echolocation, which allows them to visualise their surroundings by means of sound. Bees have a spatial, bodily language; we are now able to distinguish subtle nuances in their bodily movements and vibration – actions such as waggling, knocking, stridulation, stroking, jerking, tooting (“singing”), quivering, feeling about with the antennae, and many others.

Many scientists still regard the dances of bees as the most complex system of symbols that humans have so far deciphered in the animal world. Although many argued at first that the waggle dance should simply be called communication, Frisch insisted that the correct term is “language”: by means of a system of signs, bees exchange information, coordinate complex behaviour and form social groups.
An article from the January 2023 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks