Insectopedia
Page 19
Contemporary bee researchers have refined von Frisch and Beutler’s wartime revisions of the dance theory. There is, most now believe, no difference between the types of information contained in the two main dances.18 Both use waggling to communicate distance and direction, and in both it is the enthusiasm of the performance that conveys the quality of food. Similarly, in both, the type of flower is revealed by the scent clinging to the insect’s body.
In Munich, von Frisch had placed feeding stations directly alongside the hive to facilitate communication between his assistants observing the dances and those stationed at the feeders. However, in the round dances that the bees perform to indicate nearby food, the waggles are abbreviated, occurring just as the dancer turns to begin her new circle. Von Frisch and his team failed to observe those subtle cues, and it is likely that the bee audience doesn’t take much notice of them either, relying instead on sense of smell to locate such proximate feeding places. But when food is further away—the transition occurs at a point between 50 and 100 yards for the Carniolan bee, the bee favored by von Frisch—bees returning to the hive interpose an additional sequence of steps, a straight run that contains a “vigorous wagging” of the abdomen, a side-to-side movement they may repeat thirteen to fifteen times per second.19 It is this distinctive stretch that contains the critical information. Gyrating in darkness amid the crush of bodies on what von Frisch called the hive’s “dance floor,” the returning forager is closely shadowed by three or four followers, who receive the dance information with their antennae, utilizing scent (to identify the type of flower), taste (to gauge the quality of its product), touch, and an acoustic sensitivity that allows them to pick up the near-air movements produced by the dancer’s wings.20
The dancer uses the sun as her reference point. Illuminated by daylight on the horizontal platform at the hive entrance, her movements are indexical, pointing directly ahead, “just as we point to a distant goal with raised arm and outstretched finger.”21 Dancing in the open, she orients herself by angling her body so that the sun is at the same angle relative to her body as it was during her recent flight to the food source.22
But the vast majority of dances take place inside the hive, in total darkness, on the surface of a vertical comb. Those conditions present the bee with a significant set of problems, which she resolves by reconfiguring the indexical association between the dance and the food source. This interior dance involves a temporal and spatial displacement as the bee converts the angle of the sun, which has permitted her to mime her flight during the outdoor dances, into gravitational terms. To succeed, the bee must note optically the angle between the direction of the sun and the food source on her outbound flight, remember that information, accurately transpose it to an angle that relates to gravity, and in doing so, include a calculation that corrects for the movement of the sun in the time that has passed between her outbound flight and the dance.23
If food is located in the direction of the sun, the bee runs upward along the comb; if the feeding place is away from the sun, she runs down. If the material is located at, say, eighty degrees to the left of the sun—as in feeding table II in the diagram—she points her waggle run eighty degrees to the left of vertical (II’), and so on.24 Even if the sun is obscured by clouds, she can locate its position by recognizing patterns of polarized light invisible to humans.25
Von Frisch tracked bees foraging some seven miles from their hive and discovered that they convey distance through some combination of number and rate of waggles, velocity of forward movement, and length and duration of the straight section.26 However, distance is a “subjective” quality, which bees measure in terms of the amount of effort they expend on their outward flight. Von Frisch demonstrated this by appending weights of different kinds to various parts of the animals’ bodies, exposing them to head winds, and forcing them to walk. In each case, they reported a greater distance than they did without the handicap.27
Von Frisch liked to work with “calm and peaceful” bees.28 They were cooperative, and he was responsive, designing experiments and apparatus around their needs and desires. The bees were affected by wind and temperature. They revealed astonishingly subtle senses of smell and touch. They responded actively to changing light conditions. They grew to recognize individual field-workers. Alert to their sensitivities, he could never be certain that their observed behavior was not symptomatic of the artificiality of experimental conditions and so allowed them to force him into exhaustive (and exhausting) replications of his tests as he struggled to find ways to repeat controlled experiments in natural conditions. When his discoveries were too astonishing, he wondered whether his attention had created “a sort of scientific bee.”29
He began by building an observation hive. This was a standard beekeeping hive fitted with glass windows, through which the bees could be watched relatively undisturbed. But he soon realized that bright sunlight and the visibility of patches of sky distorted the dances, so instead he developed his own range of hives with removable panels that allowed him to manipulate external conditions.
He designed feeding stations and special food dispensers. And he invented an automatic counting apparatus disguised as a flower to record bee visits when it was impractical or unnecessary to use volunteers.
He devised a coding scheme—an ingenious one—that allowed visual identification of hundreds of individuals. And he used a fine brush to number each bee with spots of colored lacquer while they fed from his sugar water.
But his true gift was in the design of simple and effective experiments of exceptional elegance. (He initially translated the dance language, for example, by systematically removing to progressively greater distances from the hive the food source that his bees had been trained to seek and then closely observing the dances performed by the returning foragers.) And what underlay this—in addition to patience, self-criticism, and a creatively methodical practice—was his natural historical eye for bee ecology, temperament, and habit, and a deep affinity with bee ontology, the being of a bee.
It was all this that enabled him to recognize the individuality of the members of the hive, their characteristic predilections and temperaments, their shifting moods, and their subtle variations of activity. It was, without doubt, a profoundly anthropomorphic commitment. His bees are “shrewd,” “eager,” and “phlegmatic”; at one point they even exhibit “class consciousness.”30 But it would be a mistake to think that anthropomorphism, which we could think of here as the impulse to understand other beings by reference to human interiority, is a sufficient framework through which to make sense of his work. For von Frisch, the honeybees were personal friends, but they were also profoundly mysterious in their difference. And it is this gap and its crossings that permit both reverence and subjection, both the relentless search for some kind of redemptive communion and the willingness to brutalize along the way.
Perhaps it is just the moment in which all this is taking place (the terrifying, dehumanizing political-historical moment that is also the thrilling moment in which all these discoveries are entirely new). Or perhaps it is the revived ethological determination to find the human in the animal. But it is clear that both in von Frisch’s estimation and in the unfolding of his study, the bees were his collaborators as much as his subjects. He tests them—and makes no effort to hide his disappointment on the rare occasions when they fail to demonstrate their acuity. But they also test him: challenging him to devise experiments sufficiently sensitive to approximate their enigmatic way of being.
Von Frisch plunged into the Brunnwinkl research as into the lustrous depths of another world. “I tried to bury myself in it completely,” he recalled, “taking as little notice as I could help of the events around me.” Life outside Brunnwinkl was beyond control. In Munich, the Institute of Zoology lay in rubble, his house, too, “a gaping hole.” The hostilities of professional life confounded him. He persuaded his wife to burn her diary.31 Who could be trusted? Who was reading? Who might be listening? But the bee
s … The bees spoke, but they were indifferent to politics. Theirs was a language unsullied by the corrupting jargon of the Third Reich. The bees had a purity. The bees had an intelligible rationality. The bees offered refuge.
We don’t know how Ruth Beutler felt, but Martin Lindauer, eventually von Frisch’s most distinguished student, describes returning severely wounded to Munich from the Russian front, expressing the desire to study science, and being sent by his doctor to attend a lecture on cell division by Karl von Frisch. Lindauer recalls the event as an epiphany that opened the prospect of a normal, meaningful life for a confused twenty-one-year-old who had refused to join the Hitler Youth and had been sent instead to dig the foundations of Dachau, who had volunteered for the German army after an earlier lecture—this by SS officers recruiting at his high school—and who found in von Frisch a stern mentor with a “zeal for science … [who] tolerated no fraud … [who was] an extremely exacting person.”32
Perhaps it’s no surprise that, like his teacher, Lindauer experienced a profound attachment to the bees. As the national authoritarian order descended into chaos and conditions for professional science crumbled all around, von Frisch created an island of calm on Lake Wolfgang, finding in his honeybees a regularity, an ordered way of being in which, as in all well-run institutions, none need fear the unpredictable, none need feel unmoored. It was again the Germany of the amateur museum beside the Austrian lake, the Germany before the 1918 revolution, before the Weimar inflation, before the irruption of the Nazis. “After experiencing the senseless regime of the Hitler time, which was malicious, dishonest, and wrong from all perspectives,” Lindauer told an interviewer half a century later, “I drew strength from having work based on absolute correctness, honesty, and objectivity. Out of this material and spiritual collapse, this hopelessness, I was able, with Karl von Frisch as a teacher, to build a new way of life. I found a new home with the bees. It was really a new home, the bee colony.”33
3.
It is not hard to understand. The honeybee colony has tens of thousands of members whose everyday life is a wonder of self-regulated complexity, a productive order continuously brought into being through the intricate fluidity of its social relations, exchange practices, and division of labor. The very first thing von Frisch tells us in his 1953 work The Dancing Bees is that honeybees are obligate social beings, that the level of task integration and cooperative interdependence is such that a bee alone cannot survive outside the hive: “There is no smaller unit [than the colony].… One single bee, kept all by itself, would soon perish.”34
Like ants, termites, and the other social insects, honeybees live in what entomologists call caste societies, an analogy zoologists use to indicate the presence of morphologically distinct occupational groups: the egg-laying queen, the multitude of nonreproductive female workers, and the few hundred fat male drones with big eyes whose sole purpose—so far as we know—is to have sex with the queen on her single mating flight and who ultimately, as winter approaches and food resources dwindle, will be dragged from the hive by the workers, expelled to starve or, if resistant, stung to their death. “From that time onwards until the following spring,” wrote von Frisch, evoking the feminist utopias of writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “the females of the colony, left to themselves, keep an undisturbed peace.”35
Not surprisingly, it was the workers that attracted the researchers’ attention. Von Frisch and Beutler catalogued their dances, and they made far-reaching discoveries concerning their orientation abilities. Lindauer extended their findings to swarming, nest location, and the extraordinary process of nest selection, which I describe below. All three carried out detailed studies of workers’ division of labor and time allocation, although Lindauer pushed this furthest, by tracking the entire life history of a bee he called 107.
Below is Lindauer’s first schematic of worker labor allocation. It shows what Thomas Seeley has called a “division of labor based on temporary specializations” and comes from Lindauer’s classic 1961 account, Communication among Social Bees, a collection of lectures he gave at universities in the United States.36 The column of figures indicates age in days. The whimsical bee people on the left are carrying out the activity associated with a particular point in a bee’s life (cell cleaning, caring for the brood, building and repairing the hive, guarding the nest, foraging for nectar, pollen, and water). The sketches on the right show the corresponding development of glands in the animal’s head (the nurse, or feeding, gland) and abdomen (the wax glands). Despite this tight linkage of activity, physiology, and life cycle, Lindauer was fully aware that under critical circumstances—for example, a sudden food shortage—these relationships could be radically interrupted. In such a situation, the glands might stop developing and the bee begin foraging before its appointed day. A bee’s physiology and behavior were flexible, adaptive, and responsive to changing conditions.
But that isn’t all. When Lindauer tracked 107, he realized that she was not only spending more of her time multitasking than attending to the one expected assignment, but she was also doing an awful lot of wandering around (“patrolling,” indicated in Lindauer’s diagram by the bowler hat and walking stick) and a considerable amount of what appeared to be nothing (40 percent of her time, in fact, “resting” on the chaise longue). Lindauer found explanations for these observations. Patrolling, he reasoned, was a form of site monitoring that allowed the bee to identify immediate needs and allocate her time accordingly. “Loafing,” he claimed somewhat less convincingly, maintained the “reserve troops,” who could swing into action as occasion demanded.37
Both of these unexpected activities suggested the importance of horizontal, peer-to-peer communication in a society organized without leaders or centralized decision making. The honeybees’ ability to maintain the hive’s internal environment—despite changes in external ambient conditions and the availability of critical resources—relies on contact between returning foragers and those already inside. The alacrity with which foragers are relieved of their loads, for instance, shows the degree of collective need for the substance in question. And not only is the recognizably sign-based language identified by von Frisch involved. Something more fundamental to social life is also going on. The bees are in constant physical contact, palpating each other’s head and antennae, sensing each other’s odor, passing compressed pollen to each other, sharing and exchanging the sugary contents of each other’s stomach, receiving each other’s near-field vibrations. Together, constantly, in the deep communal darkness, exchanging substances, sucking and regurgitating, touching, feeling, smelling, tasting, sensing. Together, touching, in the warm darkness, sucking, feeling, touching, smelling, tasting, touching. Another country. Another language of bees.
And this language is somehow tied to that other language that is all around us here: the language of colonies, of castes and races, of sisters and half sisters, of queens and workers, the language of dance. The language of language, for heaven’s sake! This language didn’t disappear with von Frisch and Lindauer either. Today’s bee scientists speak it too, even if they often bury it in a mechanical discourse of bioenergetics, a dissonance apparent in the distance between the anthropomorphic terminology and the machine-like organism it describes.
The new bee is an evolutionary bee for whom (as for all social insects) society is the individual and whose relationship to the hive is equal to that between the cell and the body. Out of these metaphors comes a compelling narrative of bee evolution in which selective pressures operate at the level of intercolony competition for food, foraging area, and other resources, a narrative supported by the absence of observable tension within the hive.38
But von Frisch suggests a supplement. It is not only—as all beekeepers know—the hives that exhibit different personalities (some tidy, some messy, some peaceable, some aggressive). In von Frisch’s story, the interplay between individual and collectivity leaves room for individual variability and for the role of varying bee capacities an
d talents in furthering collective success. In his version, the hive is the expression of a culture of cooperation among its thousands of distinct individuals.
4.
Ernst Bergdolt, lecturer in botany at the Institute of Zoology in Munich, joined the Nazi Party in 1922, when he was just twenty years old. A presciently premature fascist, in 1937 Bergdolt became an editor of the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft (Journal for the Entire Natural Sciences), the most significant attempt to wrestle the biological sciences into conformity with Nazi ideology.39 It was Bergdolt, the leading light of the German National Socialist Lecturers’ League, who led the campaign to remove von Frisch from the Institute of Zoology. This is from a letter he wrote to the Ministry of Education, calling for the director’s dismissal:
Professor v. Frisch has an unusual ability to make propagandistic use of the results of his research, the sort of ability we know from Jewish scientists. In contrast, he lacks entirely the ability to survey his work from a broader point of view, let alone to find connections to the natural establishment of a volkish polity, something that seems so self-evident and would be so easy given his areas of expertise, bees.40
Bergdolt had already tried and failed to arrange von Frisch’s prosecution for cruelty to animals.41 His opening shot here is little more than a conventional invocation of “Jewish science.” But the second charge was more unusual. While the logic of the hive offered von Frisch and Lindauer refuge from what they experienced as the disorienting chaos of the Nazi Reich, for Bergdolt that same systematicity embodied the utopian promise of Nazism itself. The bees readily provided a mirror of the human. But they did so through lives that—despite the transparency of language—were sufficiently opaque to allow such apparently conflicting fantasies. Even if, in this instance, the fantasies were structured in the same feverish milieu.