Overview

We think of bees as being among the busiest workers in the garden, admiring them for their productivity. But amid their buzzing, they are also great communicators—and unusual dancers. As Karl von Frisch (1886–1982) discovered during World War II, bees communicate the location of food sources to each other through complex circle and waggle dances. For centuries, beekeepers had observed these curious movements in hives, and others had speculated about the possibility of a bee language used to manage the work of the hive. But it took von Frisch to determine that the bees’ dances communicated precise information about the distance and direction of food sources. As Tania Munz shows in this exploration of von Frisch’s life and research, this important discovery came amid the tense circumstances of the Third Reich. The Dancing Bees draws on previously unexplored archival sources in order to reveal von Frisch’s full story, including how the Nazi government in 1940 determined that he was one-quarter Jewish, revoked his teaching privileges, and sought to prevent him from working altogether until circumstances intervened. In the 1940s, bee populations throughout Europe were facing the devastating effects of a plague (just as they are today), and because the bees were essential to the pollination of crops, von Frisch’s research was deemed critical to maintaining the food supply of a nation at war. The bees, as von Frisch put it years later, saved his life. Munz not only explores von Frisch’s complicated career in the Third Reich, she looks closely at the legacy of his work and the later debates about the significance of the bee language and the science of animal communication. This first in-depth biography of von Frisch paints a complex and nuanced portrait of a scientist at work under Nazi rule. The Dancing Bees will be welcomed by anyone seeking to better understand not only this chapter of the history of science but also the peculiar waggles of our garden visitors.  

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The Dancing Bees will surely become a classic in the literature on the history of biology in the twentieth century. It is the definitive account of the intellectual development of Karl von Frisch and of his discoveries about the ability of honey bees to communicate with the waggle dance. Perhaps most fascinating is what Munz has uncovered about how von Frisch declared a Quarter Jew by the Nazis in 1941 was able to navigate a frightening political landscape in war-torn Germany, suffer the destruction of his Zoological Institute during the bombing of Munich, and still continue conducting experiments that revolutionized our thinking about animal communication. This book also provides intriguing insights into what von Frisch thought and felt during the heated debates about the meaning of the waggle dance in the 1960s and 1970s. --Thomas D. Seeley, author of Honeybee Democracy

Munz s intellectual biography of the animal ethologist Karl von Frisch records his ingenious experimental demonstrations of the honeybee s communication dances. She skillfully places the history of twentieth-century science alongside its calamitous political history in a rich texture that weaves the civic operations of the hive with the gross incivilities of Nazi science, the irenic experimentalism of von Frisch with the violence of total war, and the narrow mechanism of American behaviorism with the latitude of its European counterpart. Von Frisch is a low-key hero of modern science, and the moving story of his discovery of honeybee language is almost as remarkable as the insect itself. --Claire Preston, author of Bee

Author Information

Tania Munz is the vice president for research and scholarship at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. Previously, she was a lecturer at Northwestern University and a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She holds a PhD in the history of science from Princeton University.

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