Karl von Frisch

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Austrian zoologist, entomologist, and ethologist (1886–1982)

Frisch was born in Vienna, Austria, and educated at home and at convent school. He began his academic career by studying medicine at the University of Vienna, but gave this up to study zoology at the Zoological Institute in Munich, an internationally recognized center for research in experimental zoology. He also studied marine biology at the Trieste Biological Institute for Marine Research, taking his PhD for work on the color adaptation and light perception of minnows (1910). Frisch taught at the Munich Zoological Institute and in 1919 became assistant professor of zoology. He then held academic posts at the universities of Rostock and Breslau before returning to Munich in 1925 as director of the Zoological Institute where he continued to work until the end of World War II. In 1946 he assumed the chair of zoology at Graz but returned to Munich where he remained until his retirement in 1958.

Interested in animals from childhood, Frisch devoted 40 years to an intense study of the senses, communication, and social organization of honey (or hive) bees. By means of ingenious experiments he showed that bees can find their way back to the hive, even when the sun is obscured by cloud, by using polarized or ultraviolet light, and that they are able to communicate discovery of a new food source by means of a special “dance.” The bee performs its dance on the vertical surface of the comb. Depending on the distance of the food supply, the bee may perform either the round dance – food within about 80 feet (24 m) – or the tail-wagging dance – food beyond about 325 feet (99 m). At intermediate distances various transitional dance forms between these are seen. In the tail-wagging dance the bee makes a straight run over a short distance, wagging its abdomen rapidly, and then makes a semicircle back to the starting point. This movement is repeated, making a semicircle in the opposite direction. The dance gives information on the direction of the food supply because the angle that the straight run makes with the vertical surface of the comb is the same as the angle between the direction of the food and the Sun at the hive or nest.

Frisch also showed that the bees are unable to distinguish between certain shapes, that they have a limited range of color perception, but can see light of shorter wavelength than man. They do not, for example, distinguish red but can see ultraviolet, which is reflected by many flowers. Red poppies are seen as wholly ultraviolet, while many yellow flowers are seen either as yellow or in varying shades of ultraviolet. Frisch's discoveries have proved of practical benefit to beekeepers in that if hives are painted certain colors – a yellow hive next to a blue one for example – this aids the bees' homing. His major contribution to ethology was recognized in 1973 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, jointly with Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. His books include The Dancing Bees (1927, trans. 1954) and Animal Architecture (1974).

The Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch (1886-1982) is noted for his studies of insect behavior and sensory physiology. His most famous discovery was that honeybees communicate by waggle dancing.

Karl von Frisch was born on November 20, 1886, in Vienna, the son of a university professor. He displayed an early interest in animals, which his family encouraged. His uncle, Sigmund Exner, the leading authority on insect vision at the time, channeled Frisch's earliest professional endeavors into a study of vision in honeybees.

Frisch studied under Richard von Hertwig at the University of Munich and received his doctorate in zoology in 1910. Early in his career he began to make important contributions to the analysis of animal behavior. It is said that every successful scientist has a small number of personal tools with which he levers discoveries out of nature, and Frisch had two in which he attained great mastery. The first was the repeated exploitation of the passage of honeybees from nest to flowers and back again, a complex sequence of behavioral events that is nonetheless easy to manipulate and monitor. The second was the method of training, developed by Ivan Pavlov, by which Frisch associated the stimuli to be studied with a subsequent reward of food. Animals trained in this fashion respond sharply to odd stimuli that they otherwise ignore, thus revealing ultimately their sensory capacities.

Using the training method, Frisch confounded C. von Hess in their famous debate on color vision in insects. He demonstrated the ability of fish to hear and of insects to perceive polarized light. Over the years Frisch sketched out in great detail the sensory physiology of the worker honeybee. In 1945 he made the astounding discovery that honeybee workers communicate symbolically about the location of food sources such as fields of flowers. They accomplish this deep within the hive by means of the "waggle dance," in which the entire body is vibrated as the bee runs through figure-eight patterns on the vertical surface of the comb. The middle part of the figure, the "straight run," provides the information; its angle with reference to the vertical indicates the angle the follower bees must take with reference to the sun when they leave the hive; and its duration indicates the length of the trip. This mode of communication is the most complex ever discovered in invertebrate animals.

Frisch was director of the zoological institute in Munich from 1925 until World War II and again from 1950 to 1958. He received numerous honors, including the Balzan Foundation Award in 1963 and foreign memberships in the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. He, along with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergern, shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. In an article in Science regarding the Nobel Prize, Frisch was praised for teaching the world that human nature is "subject to the principles that mold the biology, adaptability and the survival of other organisms."

About his own work, Frisch philosophically wrote in A Biologist Remembers, "The layman may wonder why a biologist is content to devote 50 years of his life to the study of bees and minnows without ever branching out into research on, say, elephants, or at any rate the lice of elephants or the fleas of moles. The answer to any such question must be that every single species of the animal kingdom challenges us with all, or nearly all, the mysteries of life." Frisch died June 12, 1982, in Munich, Germany.

Further Reading

The best book on Frisch's life is his autobiography, A Biologist Remembers (1962; trans. 1964). He also reviewed his researches on honeybees in two beautifully written works available in English translation: the definitive treatise, The DanceLanguage and Orientation of Bees (1967), and a shorter introductory work, Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses and Language (1950).

(1886–1983). Austrian ethologist. Born of an academic family in Vienna, Karl von Frisch worked at several universities, in particular Breslau and Munich. His research was on the light sensitivity of sea anemones. He collaborated with his uncle Sigmund Exner (1846–1926), who became professor of physiology in Vienna and worked on both reaction times and cerebral localization. Von Frisch went on to show by behavioural experiments that fish are not, as had been thought, colour-blind. In more detail, he found that in dim light using 'rod' vision they are, like us, colour-blind, but with brighter light stimulating the retinal 'cone' cells, they do have colour vision. He went on to demonstrate, by whistling to catfish, that fish are not deaf.

Having established unexpected sensory capacities in many animals, von Frisch carried out his celebrated experiments on how scout honey bees convey information of where they have found nectar. He started by assuming that the other bees recognized the successful scout by odour, but he found evidence that the scout could convey information of direction and distance of the food source, which was surprising. Following experiments to discount the odour theory, he arrived at the wild conjecture that they signal by a symbolic dance, which he learned to interpret. Direction was normally signalled by reference to the sun, but on cloudy days it was established by the polarization angle of the light of the overcast sky, which the bee's compound eye can detect. Distance of the food source was signalled by different kinds of dance — a 'round' dance when near, and a 'waggle' dance when distant — and the speed of the dance was greater for greater distances. The direction of the food source with respect to the sun was signalled by taking the vertical of the honeycomb as, symbolically, the direction of the sun. This discovery (which has been independently confirmed) that bees use a symbolic language was wholly unexpected, and it forces us to accept that man is not unique in organizing society by means of language.

Von Frisch shared the Nobel Prize with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen in 1973. His books include: You and Life (1940), Animal Architecture (1974), and the celebrated Dancing Bees (1954).

(Published 1987)

— O. L. Zangwill

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