In his History of Animals, Aristotle noted that when bees returned to the hive, they shook or danced in front of a group. Millennia later, Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch discovered the movement’s purpose. He believed this “waggle dance” communicated the direction and distance of pollen to other bees.
The idea that bees possessed a “language” captured the attention of scientists and the imagination of the public. Classicists and scientists debated whether Aristotle anticipated Frisch—arguments that hinged on the translation of a single word. But historian Tani Munz writes that American Adrian Wenner doubted Frisch’s theory itself, leading to a decades-long feud. Munz analyzes “why the bees talked to von Frisch but only danced for Wenner,” revealing differences in scientific background and approach.
In one early experiment, Frisch showed that catfish responded to sound. Removing a fish’s eyes, he trained it to associate a whistle with food. This was Frisch’s preferred methodology, Munz argues: simple experiments, avoiding instruments when possible.
Frisch’s bee breakthrough involved such experiments starting in the 1910s. He painted patterns on bees to track them and placed food dishes near the hive. He noticed two different types of dance: a circle dance, and a waggle dance. At first, he thought they were differentiating natural sources from artificial ones. Then he realized that the dishes were close to the hive.
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“By gradually moving food dishes from the hive,” Munz writes, “he could cause the bees to shift their dances from a circle to a waggle pattern.” The different dances seemed to communicate distance.
But Wenner had a “mechanistic and Skinnerian” education, Munz writes. To him, animal behavior was largely based on stimulus and response. Wenner’s background in electronics and mathematics also influenced his experimental design. Early experiments with sound recording and photography seemed to undermine the dances’ importance and regularity.
In the 1960s, Wenner broke from Frisch entirely. New experiments seemed to show that bees simply responded to stimuli like odor or smoke, Munz explains. Frisch fought back, citing other simple experiments where he eliminated scent. But as Wenner’s papers incorporated more complex statistics, Frisch had trouble evaluating them—this wasn’t the straightforward observational data he prized.
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“Telling the Bees”
Wenner also wrote that Frisch was unduly anthropomorphizing bees. This echoed early critics, Munz writes, who feared that “to deny the uniqueness of human language was to deny human uniqueness altogether.” But Frisch believed complex behaviors implied a function. This evolutionary thinking “was perhaps the most unbridgeable difference between him and his young adversary,” Munz writes.
In the 1970s, experiments by James Gould and collaborators drove a new consensus. In one, they painted some of the bees’ eyes with black paint—a bit like Frisch’s catfish experiment. Their results indicated that bees used both odor and dance cues, and led Gould to believe that the dances constituted real communication.
The so-called “lower animals” seemed to possess complex behaviors. “Especially in ethology,” Gould summed up in 1975, “it is difficult to avoid the unprofitable extremes of blinding skepticism and crippling romanticism.”
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