The mystery of the waggle-dance

The Dancing Bees is a romantic title, evoking fantasy and fairy tale rather than scientific rigour, but actually this book is a story of fearsome determination. It is a biography of Karl von Frisch, who discovered the language of the honeybee, but Tania Munz’s account is much more besides, as it reveals the scientist’s struggle for survival under the Nazi regime.

Although I kept bees for many years, I had no idea of the work which won Von Frisch a Nobel prize in 1973. I was first introduced to the waggle-dance, this marvel of the animal kingdom, in a laboratory at the University of Sussex. Francis Ratnieks, professor of apiculture, sat me in front of one of his observation hives where you could watch the colony of bees at work through a glass panel. There I plainly witnessed what is described as the most sophisticated form of non-human communication — the waggle-dance. One bee just back from foraging for nectar traced a figure-of-eight pattern again and again while vibrating her abdomen. The bee was telling her sisters where she had been to find nectar — not just the direction of the flowers, but the distance too.

This dance has been observed since the time of Aristotle, but it was only when Von Frisch embarked on his painstaking work that the reasons for the waggle were finally unravelled. Munz’s fascinating book traces that journey. Von Frisch’s Austrian childhood reminds me of Gerald Durrell’s youthful passion for animals. Karl had a menagerie of 123 animals, only nine of which were mammals. A small parakeet named Tschocki was his constant companion, sitting on his shoulder and nibbling his papers. His real skill lay in raising fish, and when he became an professional zoologist aquatic experiments became his speciality and led him into a surprisingly ferocious debate about whether fish were colour-blind or not.