r belief he found out that fish can hear. He found that
this "buzzing around" in reality was a choreographed dance.
He described it as the shape of a "figure 8" that has been flattened. So that the two ovals
of the 8 meet in a single line instead of a point. He labelled this line between the two
ovals as the "waggle run line." He said that a returning bee positions his dance so that
angle between this "waggle run" line and the vertical axis of the honeycomb is the same
as the angle between the food source and the position of the sun. If the waggle run is
straight up,the food is directly in line with the sun; if the waggle run is straight down,
the food is in the opposite direction of the sun. This was an enormous discovery for the
whole world. Though there were of course skeptics. Although if the same evidence
were uncovered in one of our close relatives, like apes or monkeys, we would have
reacted much differently. We tend to cling to our old ideas that insects are programmed
robots even though the thought of them doing something so complex without conscious
thinking is not very well explained. Carl Jung had a unusual reaction to his discovery.
He had previously thought that insects were robots as well. Later in his life he
apparently had changed his thinking. Here is what he said:
"This view has been challenged by the researches of Karl von Frisch... bees not
...