The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) - Softcover

Munz, Tania

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022652650X ISBN 13: 9780226526508

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

We think of bees as being among the busiest workers in the garden, admiring them for their productivity. But amid their buzzing, they are also great communicators—and unusual dancers. As Karl von Frisch (1886–1982) discovered during World War II, bees communicate the location of food sources to each other through complex circle and waggle dances. For centuries, beekeepers had observed these curious movements in hives, and others had speculated about the possibility of a bee language used to manage the work of the hive. But it took von Frisch to determine that the bees’ dances communicated precise information about the distance and direction of food sources. As Tania Munz shows in this exploration of von Frisch’s life and research, this important discovery came amid the tense circumstances of the Third Reich.

The Dancing Bees draws on previously unexplored archival sources in order to reveal von Frisch’s full story, including how the Nazi government in 1940 determined that he was one-quarter Jewish, revoked his teaching privileges, and sought to prevent him from working altogether until circumstances intervened. In the 1940s, bee populations throughout Europe were facing the devastating effects of a plague (just as they are today), and because the bees were essential to the pollination of crops, von Frisch’s research was deemed critical to maintaining the food supply of a nation at war. The bees, as von Frisch put it years later, saved his life. Munz not only explores von Frisch’s complicated career in the Third Reich, she looks closely at the legacy of his work and the later debates about the significance of the bee language and the science of animal communication.

This first in-depth biography of von Frisch paints a complex and nuanced portrait of a scientist at work under Nazi rule. The Dancing Bees will be welcomed by anyone seeking to better understand not only this chapter of the history of science but also the peculiar waggles of our garden visitors.

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Tania Munz is the vice president for research and scholarship at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. Previously, she was a lecturer at Northwestern University and a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She holds a PhD in the history of science from Princeton University.

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The Dancing Bees

Karl von Frischand the Discovery of the Honeybee Language

By Tania Munz

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-52650-8

Contents

INTRODUCTION Sensational Findings, 
BEE VIGNETTE I Victorian Bees, 
CHAPTER ONE Coming of Age in Vienna, 
CHAPTER TWO The Bees That Could, 
BEE VIGNETTE II Sensing the Senses, 
CHAPTER THREE Calm before the Storm, 
CHAPTER FOUR In the Service of the Reich, 
BEE VIGNETTE III Deep inside the Hive, 
CHAPTER FIVE State of Grace, 
CHAPTER SIX Picking Up the Pieces in Postwar Germany, 
CHAPTER SEVEN Coming to America, 
BEE VIGNETTE IV Seeing Bees, 
CHAPTER EIGHT Attack on the Dance Language, 
CONCLUSION 180/60, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Coming of Age in Vienna

Karl's father, Anton von Frisch, was a nineteen-year-old medical student when he first met Marie Exner. She was the sister of a friend who'd invited him to spend part of his summer vacation in the beautiful Salzkammergut region of Austria. For the previous five summers, Marie and her siblings had left Vienna to spend their holidays there, either by invitation or, as they got older, by renting accommodations. The five Exner children had been orphaned almost a decade earlier when the youngest boy was only ten. The siblings closed ranks after the tragedy and formed a close-knit unit. Despite growing up with guardians in separate homes, they remained close throughout their adolescence and adulthood. That summer, in 1868, they rejoiced at once again being united. Spirits were especially high as various friends, including Anton, joined them to swim in the nearby lake and roam the wooded mountains.

Marie, aged twenty-four, was the only girl of the bunch and the middle child. According to family lore, the attraction between her and Anton was as immediate as it was overwhelming. But the two kept their affections secret at first, even from each other. Marie, as Anton soon learned, was already engaged to a young philosopher and family friend, Ludwig Zitkovsky, who was hoping to secure a teaching position so they could marry. And if Ludwig was not yet able to provide Marie a secure future, Anton was even further from marriage material. Although he came from a well-to-do Viennese medical family, he was only in his second semester of medical school.

And yet when Ludwig and his family also arrived at the holiday destination, the contrast between the two men struck Marie with painful clarity. She later acknowledged that in Ludwig, "a certain feebleness and weakness of will had bothered me all along." With her feelings for him so diminished and no obvious way to extricate herself from the promise of marriage, she sank into despondency. Ludwig sensed her withdrawal and tried to make sense of the change. One day, when he and his mother were about to confront the unhappy young woman about her intentions, it all became too much — Marie escaped from the room and "ran into the forest, up the mountain, until she could no longer." After that summer, the two muddled on with Marie feeling increasingly distant and Ludwig still hopeful that they might overcome whatever had come between them. Marie felt trapped.

The following spring, her oldest brother, Adolf, came home to Vienna for the Easter holiday. He had just started a professorship of jurisprudence at the University of Zurich and now invited Marie to join him there for a visit. She gladly accepted the invitation to escape her increasingly oppressive ties to Ludwig. On the train to Switzerland, she finally broke down. She confessed to her brother that she could no longer get herself to love Ludwig and that she had fallen for their friend Anton. Her brother took the sobbing girl into his arms and comforted her as best he could: "You've just grown apart. You're no longer suited for each other, nobody is to blame." Marie found much-needed solace in her brother's support and finally composed a letter to break off the engagement after her arrival in Zurich. She later remembered feeling "like someone who was finally free after a terrible incarceration."

Adolf would remain in Zurich for three years. His youngest brother, Franz Serafin, soon joined him there to study physics at the newly founded Polytechnic University, later known as the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (or ETH). During this time, Marie came for a second extended visit, and the siblings imbibed the rich intellectual life of the city. Through Adolf's juridical and Serafin's scientific colleagues, they became part of a lively circle. Among their friends from this time, they counted the famous architect Gottfried Semper, the archeologist Karl Dilthey, and the well-known poet, writer, and politician Gottfried Keller. Though Keller had already turned fifty by the time he met Adolf, a warm friendship developed between the two, and he would carry on a charming correspondence with Adolf and especially Marie until shortly before his death in 1890. The writer also joined the Exners over the summer of 1873 in the Salzkammergut and again in 1874 when he visited them for three weeks in Vienna.

By the time of Keller's second visit with the Exners, much had changed for the siblings. Adolf had left Zurich for a position at the University of Vienna, and he and Marie were now sharing part of a house in the city. They had prepared a room for Keller's visit, "completely quiet and friendly with a rose bed in front of the window." Marie's life, too, had moved in significant directions. Once she had freed herself from her ties to Ludwig, her relationship with Anton von Frisch blossomed. The two planned to marry in late fall of 1874. Anton had by then advanced to an assistantship under the famous Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. The same year he and Marie married, he was named professor of anatomy at the Art Academy (Akademie der Bildenden Künste), a position he would hold for the next twenty-five years. His career would continue to flourish. He published widely on topics that ranged from bacteriology and diagnostics to surgery and emerged as a central figure in the establishment of the modern discipline of urology. Anton's professional success ensured that the von Frisches enjoyed a high standard of living. While Karl would later remember them as never having been overly wealthy, he acknowledged that his upbringing was privileged, with the family's social and intellectual lives ably facilitated by Marie.

Marie was also instrumental in the purchase and running of what would become the von Frisch family's permanent summer residence and safe haven during the world wars, as well as the site for many of Karl's most important experiments. Shortly after she and Anton married, they acquired an old mill in Brunnwinkl nestled by the picturesque Wolfgangsee in Austria's Salzkammergut where they had first met. Gradually the family acquired more property surrounding the mill, and eventually their country residence included five houses around the lake. The houses became an enduring vacation spot, not just for the von Frisches but also for their varied and influential friends. In this setting, Marie ran a sort of country salon — the von Frisches' guests included Marie's own learned family as well as the likes of Theodor Billroth, the composer Johannes Brahms, and the Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, who read to the Brunnwinklers from her manuscript in progress.

The von Frisches' own family would also expand over the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022652650X
• ISBN 13: 9780226526508
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 296
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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