The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language

September 8, 2016, at the Linda Hall Library

Tania Munz, former Vice President for Research and Scholarship at the Linda Hall Library and now Chief Program Officer at the American Academy of Sciences.

About the lecture:

The bees are dying. And what normally goes unremarked comes into stark relief – humans depend on these insects for much of their food supply, and that which threatens the insects also very much threatens our species. But this isn’t the first time humans have made a concerted effort to solve the bees mysterious dying. During WWII, a bee plague devastated central European bee populations and Germany, especially, was waging a war of attrition that critically centered on food.

The situation was so dire that a scientist by the name of Karl von Frisch would be able to successfully argue to keep his research position, despite having been declared one-quarter Jewish by the Nazi government. He re-trenched his work in an effort to help solve the mystery of the dying bees. And he would do some of his most important work during the period – he discovered the honeybee dance language – with funding from the Nazi Ministry of Food and Agriculture. But in the face of such dazzling insect and scientific accomplishment, the dire situation from which these findings arose is all but forgotten. It all started with the dying bees.

[CotieJones]

I am so glad I found this. Truly illuminating.

[JonathanBrown]

I had very similar experiences in my scientific career, of course without the threat of racial extermination. I dreamed up projects that drug companies would fund in order to pay for work that no one would fund, and frequently the commercial projects turned out to be much more interesting and scientifically worthwhile than I expected. (I was helped by the fact that these were epidemiology projects, not product development or testing, so it was possible to find topics that maintained a neutral scientific purpose and perspective.)