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Jun 13, 2017 · Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize in 1973 in part for deciphering the language of the bees. In some of his first experiments he put a honey bee hive in a field with a single nectar feeder for the bees to collect from. Dr. Frisch then sat and watched the bees inside their hive.
- Introduction
- Ecological Context: When Is Dance Communication Beneficial?
- Evolutionary Context: Where and When Did The “Dance Language” Evolve?
- Conclusions
- Conflict of Interest Statement
- Acknowledgments
In 1973, the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research on the honey bee waggle dance (Von Frisch, 1967). He recognized how this unique form of communication allowed bees to share information on the location of food sources with nest-mates. Von Frisch described the dance as “the most astounding example of non-pr...
An important feature of dance communication is that bees dance more for better resources (Von Frisch, 1967). A resource is graded depending on its energetic value with reference to the colonies current needs (Seeley, 1986, 1989). As a consequence, recruits of waggle dances can discover high quality food sources without having to sample other option...
Extant Species of Apis
The greatest diversity of extant Apis species is found in tropical Asia. There is debate as to the true number of Apis species: at the conservative end there are 6 or 7 (Alexander, 1991; Engel and Schultz, 1997) recognized extant species of Apis, while others have argued that there are 10 or 11 species (Arias and Sheppard, 2005; Lo et al., 2010). All extant species dance to communicate the location of food resources and nest sites (Dyer, 2002; Oldroyd and Wongsiri, 2006; Beekman et al., 2015)...
Extinct Ancestors
Bees evolved from apoid wasps (Apoidea) approximately 140–110 million years ago (Danforth et al., 2013). The oldest known eusocial bee fossil is Cretotrigona prisca. It was found in Cretaceous New Jersey amber and is estimated to be 65–70 million years old (Michener and Grimaldi, 1988; Engel, 2000). This fossil is remarkable because of its similarities with workers of present day stingless bees (Meliponini), which are a derived group of highly eusocial bees. The fossil indicates that socialit...
When and in What Context Did Waggle Dance Communication Evolve?
Some authors have proposed that the honey bee dance originally evolved to allow bees to select a nest site and that the dance was only later co-opted for foraging (Oldroyd and Wongsiri, 2006; Beekman et al., 2008; Beekman and Lew, 2008). Indeed, dance communication plays a fundamental role during swarming and nest-site selection (Seeley, 2010): when colonies look for a new nest site they send out scouts to evaluate and propose different options to their sisters with their dances. This leads t...
A combination of theoretical and empirical studies has increased our understanding of why present day honey bees dance to indicate the location of valuable resources. These studies suggest that the spatial information acquired from a dance is most valuable in environments with resources that are spatially clustered, difficult to find, temporally st...
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
We thank Michael Engel for providing information about the evolution of Apis, Chloé Schmidt for the drawings in Figure 1and Eric Lucas for comments. We also thank two reviewers for their helpful suggestions. This work was funded by an Ambizione Fellowship from the Swiss NSF (PZOOP3_142628/1).
- Robbie I'Anson Price, Christoph Grüter
- 2015
Karl von Frisch (born Nov. 20, 1886, Vienna, Austria—died June 12, 1982, Munich, W.Ger.) was a zoologist whose studies of communication among bees added significantly to the knowledge of the chemical and visual sensors of insects. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with animal behaviourists Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Karl von Frisch (1914) was the first to demonstrate in behavioral experiments of this kind that bees possess a true color sense. He demonstrated that honeybees are able to distinguish a blue-colored card-board from a series of cardboards which appeared grey to the human eye. ^ Frisch (1962), pp. 93–96.
Nov 25, 2019 · Karl von Frisch discovered that European honeybees perform a waggle dance that communicates at least to the experimenter, the direct flight path to the indicated goal (a feeding site or a new nesting site) ). It was difficult for Karl von Frisch and his co-workers to prove that the dance message was also received and applied by the bees ...
The Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch began the exploration of color vision in honey bees when, in 1919, he asked whether or not bees have color vision. He performed an elegant experiment that showed not only that the bees could discriminate colors but that they demonstrated associative learning.
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Dec 1, 2017 · It has been proposed (Couvillon, 2012; von Frisch, 1967) that ancestral honey bees communicated first by excitatory runs (perhaps similar to bumblebees) that involved shaking of the body and were aligned toward the foraging site. The simple waggle dance could be thought of as re-enacting the departure direction of the forager bee from the hive.
