[bees buzzing]
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: For thousands of years,
bees have been symbols of mindless industry.
We always think of them as being something
like biological robots, doomed to live out their lives
in lockstep, shackled to the dreary roles
assigned to them by nature.
This is our first contact story.
It happened in a place called Brunnwinkl in rural Austria
in the early 1900s.
[music playing]
From the time Karl von Frisch was a child,
he longed to understand what the other animals knew,
how they perceived the world.
He wanted to know if tiny fish saw
color or had a sense of smell.
He invented experiments to explore animal experience.
And he filmed them.
Starting in the early 20th century,
he was the first to use the new medium of motion pictures
to create popular science entertainment
and communication.
For thousands of years, humans have noted the eccentric dances
of the bees.
But no one had ever looked at them
with the kind of respect that assumed there
was a reason to their dancing.
Before Karl von Frisch, no one ever
thought to ask why they moved this way and that way,
in a succession of elaborate figure eights.
Von Frisch studied every tiny bee gesture
and became fascinated by a mystery he couldn’t explain.
He would set out a dish of sugar water
for a bee from his experimental hive.
The bee would feast upon it before flying back home.
The marked bee would later return to dine
on the delicious sugar water.
Von Frisch noted that in just a few hours,
a multitude of other bees would join her there.
They were always her fellow hive mates.
But here was the really amazing thing.
Von Frisch knew that the other bees
had not followed the marked bee to the feeding place.
How?
Because he had the hive closely watched at all times.
He had been careful to use sugar water, not honey,
so that the bees’ sense of smell could
not guide them to the reward.
He continued to move the dish of sugar water
farther away until it was several kilometers
from the hive.
Still, the hive mates would find their way to it.
So how did the painted bee reveal the exact location
of the sugar water with such precision
that her hive mates could unerringly
find their way there?
[music playing]
There was a secret message in her choreography.
What had seemed to countless generations of observers
to be nothing more than the meaningless spasmodic motions
of a dumb animal was actually a complex message,
an equation informed by mathematics, astronomy,
and an acute knowledge of time, all
synthesized to convey the location
of the riches she hoped to share with her sisters.
The dancer use the angle of our star, the sun,
to indicate the general direction
of the food’s location.
Von Frisch noted that when a bee danced straight upward,
she meant “fly toward the sun.”
And when she moved downward, she meant “fly away from it.”
Her swivels, left and right, conveyed
the food’s exact coordinates in space,
sometimes kilometers away.
The duration of her dance, down to a fraction of a second,
indicated the length of time it would take
her fellow bees to get there.
She even factored in wind speed to more finely calibrate
the message she danced.
And this was true at any time of the year
and from hive to hive, from continent to continent.
Bees can do the math.
