Karl von Frisch

Origins and early life

Karl Ritter von Frisch was born in Vienna on 20 November 1886, the youngest of four sons of the surgeon and urologist Anton von Frisch and Marie Exner; all four became university professors, and Karl was of partial Jewish ancestry. He studied at the University of Vienna under Hans Leo Przibram and at Munich under Richard von Hertwig, turning from medicine to the natural sciences, and took his doctorate in 1910.

Work and career

The Nazi regime took an unfriendly interest in him, in part for employing Jewish assistants, many of them women; he was eventually pushed into retirement, and the decision was reversed only because his work on nosema disease mattered to the bees on which the country's crops depended. He returned to the Munich institute in 1950 after four years at Graz, and retired in 1958. His subject was what a bee can perceive and what it can tell another bee.

He showed by training them on coloured cards that bees see colour, their range shifted away from red and into the ultraviolet, so that flowers we read as identically yellow are to them patterned and distinct. He showed that they read the polarisation of light in a patch of blue sky, invisible to us, and so keep their bearings and the time of day. And he decoded the waggle dance: the returning forager's run tells the hive the direction of the food relative to the sun, and its duration the distance.

The 1927 account was long doubted before it was confirmed. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, and died in Munich on 12 June 1982.