How Karl von Frisch Saved Dancing Honeybees From the Nazis

By the time Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch started studying bees, the science of animal behavior had been largely discredited. But he eventually received a Nobel Prize for his work, which revealed the magical dance by which bees communicate:

Although beekeepers and naturalists had known for centuries that bees communicated the location of food sources to each other, no one knew how. Von Frisch was the first to make the distinction between what he called the “circle dance” and the “waggle dance” performed by bees returning to the hive. He tracked the movements of their bodies and realized that communication of some kind was taking place. Initially, he thought that bees used the dances to indicate different kinds of food, but when he resumed his experiments in 1944, he realized that both dances communicate location. When the food was more than 100 meters away, the bees used the waggle dance to indicate the far more complex information of location. This communication required a bee to register the details of its flight, recall its content hours afterwards, and, of course, translate and perform its significant information to a comprehending audience. It’s a complex and beautiful thing. The bee has to figure out how to use the sun as her directional reference while dancing in complete darkness inside the hive!

As an added bonus, von Frisch was persecuted for resisting the Nazification of his science:

The bees become his refuge. He gets caught up in the Nazi remaking of the universities, and the Nazis’ attempt to appropriate the language of science and scientific ideology. Under the Civil Service Laws, academics had to produce documentary proof of their Aryan ancestry. One of von Frisch’s grandparents was Jewish. At first, you couldn’t teach in the university if you were a quarter Jewish, then it moved to one eighth. He was shielded for a while, in part because he was an important scholar but also because there was a lot of protection within the university. In October 1941, he was finally forced out. The campaign against him was led by Ernst Bergdolt, a lecturer in botany at the Institute, who wrote to the Ministry of Education calling for von
Frisch’s dismissal on grounds of his failure to make his research on bees do ideological work for the Nazis.

The Language of the Bees: An Interview with Hugh Raffles [Cabinet]