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 of the flowers in relation to the sun. Its duration tells how far away they are--.4 sec. for 200 yds., 1.3 sec. for 1,000. The rate of wiggling is important, too. Dr. Steche attached tiny magnets to bees' bottoms and found that a rich food-find produces faster wiggling.

Dr. Steche's next step was to make an artificial bee of wood, mount it on the end of a 5-in. spiral of wire attached to an oscillator. He sticks the model, faintly perfumed with lavender, through a hole in a glass-walled hive and lets the oscillator wiggle it. The bees crowd around and observe. As soon as they get the message, they swarm out and unerringly fly to the lavender-flavored sugar water that has been placed to reward them.

Dr. Steche has succeeded in directing his bees to sugar water at various angles from the hive and as far as 1,000 yds. away. In an average half-hour experiment, as many as 150 bees understand his wiggled words and take advantage of them.

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