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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

The story behind the card

The dance takes place on the vertical honeycomb inside the dark hive. A run straight up the comb means 'fly towards the sun'; a run angled 40 degrees to the right of vertical means 'fly 40 degrees to the right of the sun'. The longer the waggle run lasts, the farther away the food: roughly one second stands for about a kilometre. The Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch worked this out over decades of experiments, publishing the direction and distance code in the 1940s, and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen. In 2005 researchers tracked recruited bees by radar and confirmed that they fly where the dance points.

Türkçe oku
Kovana dönen bal arısı, yiyeceğin yerini dans ederek anlatır: Sallanarak yürüdüğü düz çizginin açısı yiyeceğin güneşe göre yönünü, bu yürüyüşün süresi de uzaklığını gösterir.

Dans, karanlık kovanın içinde dikey duran petek üzerinde yapılır. Petekte dümdüz yukarı doğru yürümek “güneşe doğru uç” demektir; dikeyin 40 derece sağına doğru yürümek ise “güneşin 40 derece sağına uç”. Sallanarak yürüme ne kadar uzun sürerse yiyecek o kadar uzaktadır: Kabaca bir saniye, bir kilometre kadar bir mesafeye karşılık gelir. Avusturyalı zoolog Karl von Frisch bu şifreyi onlarca yıllık deneylerle çözdü, yön ve uzaklık kodunu 1940'larda yayımladı ve 1973 Nobel Fizyoloji veya Tıp Ödülü'nü Konrad Lorenz ve Nikolaas Tinbergen'le paylaştı. 2005'te araştırmacılar dansı izleyen arıları radarla takip etti ve arıların gerçekten dansın gösterdiği yöne uçtuğunu doğruladı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Waggle dance
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