A returning honeybee tells the hive where food is by dancing: the angle of its 'waggle' encodes the direction relative to the sun, and its duration encodes the distance.

Karl von Frisch (Nobel Prize, 1973)

ScienceMind

Why it matters

The idea in context

Decoded by Karl von Frisch, who won a Nobel Prize for it, the waggle dance is one of the few known symbolic languages outside humans. A bee that has found flowers a kilometre away can translate that journey into a figure-of-eight on a vertical honeycomb, in the dark, and dozens of others will read it and fly straight there. Communication, it turns out, did not wait for words.

Türkçe

Aynı kart, başka bir dilde.

Kovana dönen bir bal arısı, yiyeceğin yerini dans ederek anlatır: ‘sallanma’ hareketinin açısı güneşe göre yönü, süresi ise uzaklığı kodlar.

Bu buluşuyla Nobel Ödülü kazanan Karl von Frisch’in çözdüğü sallanma dansı, insan dışında bilinen ender simgesel dillerden biridir. Bir kilometre ötede çiçek bulan bir arı, o yolculuğu karanlıkta, dikey bir petek üzerinde bir sekiz rakamına çevirir; onlarca arı bunu okuyup doğruca oraya uçar. Anlaşılan iletişim, sözcükleri beklemedi.

Source trail

Read beyond the card.

Karl von Frisch decoded the honeybee waggle dance; awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973 (with Lorenz and Tinbergen).

Background reading: Waggle danceAttribution and context are revised when stronger evidence appears. Corrections are welcome through the editorial page.
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