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.
A Sun Compass in the Brain
The most complex element of the waggle dance is its directional component. Inside the dark hive, the dance is performed on a vertical honeycomb. The angle of the waggle run relative to the vertical axis directly corresponds to the angle of the food source outside relative to the sun's position. A dance straight up the comb means "fly directly toward the sun." A dance 40 degrees to the left of vertical means "fly 40 degrees to the left of the sun."
This navigational ability is remarkable because the sun is a moving target. Bees possess an internal clock that allows them to compensate for the sun's movement across the sky, adjusting their flight and their dance angles accordingly. Bees can navigate accurately on overcast days. Specialized photoreceptors in the dorsal region of their compound eyes can detect the pattern of polarized light in the sky. This pattern, invisible to humans, is determined by the sun's position, allowing a bee to infer the sun's location even when it is obscured by clouds. This ability to use a "celestial map" makes their communication system a sophisticated symbolic languages in the animal kingdom.