He revealed the sensitivity of bees to ultraviolet and polarized light, and also solved how honeybees transmit information to each other in the hive using a unique "dance".
He worked on fish, insects, and bees respectively. He solved the dances of bees and yes, of course, he received the Nobel Prize in 1973.
Karl von Frisch (b. 20 November 1886 - d. 12 June 1982) was an ethologist of Austrian origin. He is especially known for his studies on bee behavior and senses. He revealed the sensitivity of bees to ultraviolet and polarized light, and also solved how honeybees transmit information to each other in the hive using a unique "dance". He was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with his colleagues Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen.
UNDERSTANDING A SCIENTIST: KARL VON FRISCH
Karl von Frisch was born in Vienna on November 20, 1886, as the son of university professor Anton Ritter von Frisch and Marie Exner. After completing his grammar education, he studied at the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna. He transferred to the Faculty of Philosophy and continued his Zoology education in Munich and Vienna. In 1910, Karl Von Frish received his doctorate from the University of Vienna. In the same year, he became Richard Hertwig's assistant at the Zoological Institute of the University of Munich. Being Richard Hertwig's assistant is a critical phase for Karl von Frisch. To understand why, it is necessary to take a look at Hertwig's life. Hertwing was a prominent German zoologist of the time. The Hertwing family was also a very original family. Richard Hertwig's younger brother, Oscar Hertwig, who contributed to Karl von Frish's view from a different perspective, was an embryologist who analyzed zygote formation.
Karl Ritter von Frisch, (20 November 1886 – 12 June 1982) was a German-Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz.
As a result of his studies at the university, Karl von Frish earned a certificate in Zoology and Comparative Anatomy. When the calendar turned to 1921, Karl von Frish went to the University of Rostock as a professor and director of the Faculty of Zoology. In the year 1923, another breaking point occurred in Karl von Fish's life. Moves to Breslau. And with this move, he replaced his former teacher Richard Hertwig in Munich in 1925. Although this seems like a normal situation, it is a very difficult task for Karl von Frisch to replace Hertwing, who gave him the ability to look at Karl von Frisch's life from a new perspective.
Karl von Frisch, who managed the construction of a new Zoological Institute with the best conditions available, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, experienced another break in his life with the destruction of this region during the Second World War. And the impact of these breaks first showed itself when he went to Graz in 1946. After he went to Graz, the institute was reopened. Of course, following this news, Karl von Frish returned to Munich in 1950. From his marriage to Karl von Frisch Margarete, née Mohr, he had a son, Otto von Frisch. He continued his scientific work as an Honorary Professor from 1958 until June 12, 1982, the date of his death.
In order to describe Karl von Frish as the man who made the bees dance and to understand how he did this, we need to shed light on the years 1958-1982. Why are these dates important to us? The answer to this question is hidden in 1973: in the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Nobel Prize was awarded jointly to Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Nikolaas Tinbergen "for their discoveries concerning the regulation and elicitation of patterns of individual and social behavior."
Frisch discovered that bees can distinguish various flowering plants by their scent and that each bee has flower constancy. Interestingly, their sensitivity to a sweet taste is slightly stronger than humans. Karl von Frisch thought that this might be due to the tight combination of a bee's sense of smell and touch.
Frisch was the second person to demonstrate that honeybees have color vision. The first person to demonstrate this was Charles Henry Turner, who achieved this using classical conditioning. Karl von Frisch revealed that bees have color vision, but how? He trained bees to feed on sugar water placed on a blue card. Then he placed the blue card in the middle of the gray cards. He thought that if the bees saw the blue card as grayscale, he would confuse it. The bees that came to the bait visited more than one card to be lined up. It was observed that the bees only visited the blue card because it was visually different from the other cards.
Thanks to Frish, we also learned the nature of the movements called waggle dance, which is an important point in the life of bees. What does this do? It allows us to learn about the progress of the day in the depths of a dark beehive.
This makes it possible for the bees to always transmit up-to-date directional information during their waggle dances, without making comparisons with the sun during long dance phases. This provides them not only with alternative directional information but also additional temporal information.
They can also understand what may be present in the food source (type of food, pollen, propolis, water) through their sense of smell. They have such a perfectly functioning orientation that bees can easily find a food source with the help of the waggle dance, even if there are mountains of obstacles that they have to navigate.