Les mots inconnus

(1) For centuries, beekeepers noticed that when one honeybee found a rich patch of flowers, many other bees from the same hive soon arrived there too. How the bees shared this information remained a mystery until the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch studied it closely in the twentieth century.

(2) Von Frisch observed that a returning forager performs a series of movements on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. In the so-called waggle dance, the bee runs in a straight line while shaking its body, then circles back and repeats the run. The angle of this run in relation to the vertical shows the direction of the food in relation to the sun. The length of the waggle phase indicates how far away the food is: the longer it lasts, the more distant the source.

(3) Not every scientist accepted these conclusions. Some argued that the other bees simply followed the smell of the flowers that clung to the dancer's body. Later experiments, however, supported von Frisch's view, and in 1973 he shared the Nobel Prize for his work on bee behavior. Today, researchers regard the dance as one of the most remarkable forms of communication known among animals.