Reading The Language of Honey-bees
There are many different varieties of bee. Some live in large groups like the honey-bee, and make their nests in trees or holes in the rocks. Other species make their nests in holes in the ground. There are also varieties that do not live in groups at all. Among the different kinds of bee, it is the honey-bee that has interested scientists most because of the "language" they use to communicate with each other. The development of the modem beehive in 1851 made it possible to design experiments to research the language of honey-bees.

Professor Karl von Frisch, a scientist from Austria, spent many years of his life researching the amazing ways honey-bees communicate in their dark hives. After working with bees for many years, Professor yon Frisch was puzzled by something he had noticed again and again. When he placed little dishes of honey on a table, bees soon came. As soon as one bee discovered the honey, many more came to it one after another in a short time. It seemed that one bee was able to communicate the news of food to other bees in its hive. How was this possible? To find out, von Frisch built special hives, each with only one honeycomb. He built a transparent wall through which he could observe what went on inside. In order to tell the bees apart, he painted some bees with little dots of colour.

When a marked bee returned to the hive from the feeding table, von Frisch watched through the glass. To his surprise, the bee began to perform a dance on the surface of the honeycomb. First it made a circle to the right, then to the left. It repeated these circles over and over again. But that was not all. The dance seemed to excite the surrounding bees. They trooped behind the first dancer, copying its movements. Then the bees left the hive and went to the feeding place. The circle dance seemed to communicate news of food. But what else?

Von Frisch assumed that the dance conveyed more information. To find out whether his assumption was correct, he set up two feeding places. One was close to the hive, the other was much farther away, beyond some trees. He marked all the bees that came to the nearby feeding place blue, and all the bees that went to the far-away place red. When the bees came back to the hive, yon Frisch saw a curious sight. All the bees that had been at the nearby feeding place were doing the circling dance. The bees that had been at the distant feeding place were doing a completely different dance, a wagging dance. The dancer ran in a straight line, wagging from side to side. Then it turned in a semicircle, ran straight again, and turned in another semicircle to the opposite side. It kept repeating the "steps" over and over. Things were clear now. It was evident that the circle dance told the bees about the location of the feeding place. It was also apparent that the wagging dance, where the bee moved sideways, sent another message about the feeding place.

Next, von Frisch and his colleagues set up a feeding place close to the hive. Then they slowly moved it farther and farther away. Back at the hive they watched the wagging dance closely. With a stop-watch, they counted how many times the bees repeated the dance during one minute. They discovered that the farther away the feeding station was, the slower the dance was. So another astonishing fact came to light. The number of wagging dances per minute told the exact distance to the feeding place. They also found out that bees fly a maximum distance of 3.2 kilometres between their hive and a feeding place.

The remaining question for Professor von Frisch and his partners was to find out whether bees could tell each other the exact position of a feeding place. For example, was it possible for bees to communicate precise details such as north, south, southwest and southeast? To answer the question, Professor von Frisch and his colleagues would have to obtain enough data to provide an adequate account of the bees' behaviour. After designing more experiments, they were able to clarify the procedure by which bees communicate information that they use to find and fetch food.

When honey-bees have discovered a feeding place, they fly directly to it from the hive. After a short time a line of bees fly to and from the hive like a thin stream. Centuries ago, the word "'bee-line" was created and today the expression "to make a beeline for someone or something" means to go quickly along a straight course for somebody or something.

For his lifetime's work in studying the communication of animals, including honey-bees, Professor Karl von Frisch was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1973, which he shared with two other scientists. He died in 1982.
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