[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.
