Waggle dance controversy resolved by radar records of bee flight paths
Author(s)
Joe Riley
Abstract
In the ‘dance language’ of honey bees, the dancer generates a specific, abstract and symbolic message that describes the location of a new food source, and this message is ‘displaced’ in both space and time from her discovery of that source. Karl von Frisch concluded that bees ‘recruited’ by this dance used the information encoded in it to guide them directly to the remote food source. However, some scientists were not convinced and this article summarizes new work to prove Von Frisch was right.
