Tania Munz. The Dancing Bees

In The Dancing Bees, a biography of Nobel Prize–winning ethologist Karl von Frisch (1886–1982), Tania Munz tells two stories: one of Frisch and his research program on honeybee behavior and communication, and the other of changing human interpretations and representations of the bee. The Frisch story begins with his privileged upbringing in turn-of-the-century Vienna, with summer vacations among the alpine lakes of the Salzkammergut region, in the little town of Brunnwinkl. He then studied medicine at the University of Vienna, but soon switched to experimental zoology in Richard Hertwig’s Zoological Institute in Munich. Frisch rose through the ranks in the German university system, eventually becoming successor to Hertwig and building a new institute in Munich with money from the Rockefeller Foundation. His early research was on sense perception, especially vision, in fish, crustaceans, and insects, and on the problem of how to infer from an animal’s behavior what it is taking in from its environment and what is going on in its mind. Frisch would train the animal, for example, to find food on a colored surface, and would then give it choices of similar colors and shades of gray to make it show its powers of visual discrimination. In field experiments, he also was impressed by the ability of bees to recruit additional workers to exploit a food source, and began to take an interest in how they might communicate with each other, and what sorts of information they had to exchange.

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