Science: How to Talk to a Bee

More than 20 years ago, Austrian-born Dr. Karl von Frisch discovered that bees communicate by dancing on the honeycomb. Last week his pupil, Dr. Wolfgang Steche, 38, of Bonn's Institute for Bee Science, explained that he had learned to speak a little of the bees' language.

By patient observation over the years. Dr. Steche learned the particular dance (really a wiggling walk) that a worker bee does when she wants to steer her worker hivemates to flowers that she has found. As she dances on the vertical comb, the divergence of her dance right or left from the vertical indicates the direction...

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