50, 100 & 150 Years Ago; August 2012; Scientific American Magazine; by Daniel C. Schlenoff; 1 Page(s)

August 1962

Bee Jargon For almost two decades my colleagues and I have been studying one of the most remarkable systems of communication that nature has evolved. This is the language of the bees: the dancing movements by which forager bees direct their hivemates, with great precision, to a source of food. In our earliest work we had to look for the means by which the insects communicate and, once we had found it, to learn to read the language. Then we discovered that different varieties of the honeybee use the same basic patterns in slightly different ways; that they speak different dialects, as it were. This led us to examine the dances of other species in the hope of discovering the evolution of this marvelously complex behavior. —Karl von Frisch