Customer Reviews

The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees

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This book unveils a marvelous language between animals. After reading it you can not any more smash a bee!

The content of the discovery is impressive : one bee can tell her colleague that there is food at 1 300 meters in the North-West direction... Animals can talk using a symbolic language and we know their words.

The thorough methodology used by Karl van Frisch and his students is very impressive as well. No place is left for doubt. 20 years of experiments are described with a German luxury of details. This is a scientific lesson in those time where we do not accept response time exceeding 2 seconds when browsing the web desperatly looking for information.

This is a fascinating book, completely walking step-by-step through all of von Frisch's experiments. It describes his methods for finding out if and how bees react to different things such as size, shape, color, and distance. It also explains the differences in the bee races and their benefits when hybridized. It is amazing to read about how someone watched this communication, previously unknown, completely unfold into the world of bees where polarized light is your guide, and your dances tell the hive how far away their flowers are, or water, and how good of a source it is.