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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