Study
The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees
von Frisch, Karl
Harvard University Press, 1967
Four decades of observation and experiment with glass-walled hives and individually marked bees, in which returning foragers were watched dancing and the recruits that followed them were tracked to feeding stations.
- Studied in
- Apis mellifera
- Sample size
- decades of observations across many colonies
Returning foragers perform a repeated figure-of-eight "waggle" run on the comb. The angle of the run relative to vertical corresponds to the direction of the food relative to the sun, and the duration of the waggle portion corresponds to the distance.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Honey bees communicate the direction and distance of a resource to nestmates through a symbolic dance.
How NatureHQ reads it
This is the foundation of everything written about bee communication, and it earned a share of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It was also seriously challenged: through the 1960s and 1970s, Adrian Wenner and colleagues argued recruits were finding food by scent rather than by decoding the dance. That dispute ran for decades and was only settled by later technology, which is a useful reminder that a famous result is not automatically an uncontested one.
- Observational and inferential by the standards of later work; the causal link between dance and recruit flight path was not directly measured.
- The scent-versus-dance dispute remained unresolved for roughly thirty years after publication.
- Concerns one species, in which dance dialects also vary between subspecies.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Academic book publishersPublished as an academic monograph.
doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674418776
This reference was checked by an editor on 2026-08-09.
A note on this reference: The DOI is the 1993 Harvard University Press reprint; NatureHQ cites the 1967 first edition, which predates DOI registration and has no identifier of its own. Same work, different edition.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-09.