The Language of the Hive
In the mid-20th century, the hills around Saint-Paul-de-Vence became an outdoor laboratory for Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch. He was investigating a strange figure-eight dance performed by honeybee foragers, a behavior now known as the "waggle dance." His work, which began as early as 1919, eventually proved that these movements were not random; they were a language used to communicate the precise location of food sources to other bees in the hive. For this work, von Frisch was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973.
Von Frisch's experiments involved setting up feeding stations at varying distances and directions from an observation hive. He marked individual bees, often of the gentle Carniolan subspecies (Apis mellifera carnica), with colored dots to track their movements. He observed two primary dances. For food sources closer than about 50 meters, a forager performs a "round dance," moving in circles to indicate general proximity. For anything farther, the bee performs the waggle dance. The duration of the central "waggle run" directly correlates to the distance of the food source. The longer the run, the farther the flight. The vigor of the dance itself communicates the quality of the nectar or pollen.