Karl Ritter[a] von Frisch, ForMemRS[1] (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.

[2][3] His work centered on investigations of the sensory perceptions of the honey bee and he was one of the first to translate the meaning of the waggle dance.

His theory, described in his 1927 book Aus dem Leben der Bienen (translated into English as The Dancing Bees), was disputed by other scientists and greeted with skepticism at the time.

[6] Karl studied at the University of Vienna under Hans Leo Przibram and in Munich under Richard von Hertwig, initially in the field of medicine, but later turned to the natural sciences.

Frisch was the second to demonstrate that honey bees had color vision (first was Charles Henry Turner), which he accomplished by using classical conditioning.

[10] A bee's color perception is comparable to that of humans, but with a shift away from the red toward the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.

Frisch's experiments caused a reaction from established professor Carl von Hess, who had concluded in his 1912 book Vergleichende Physiologie des Gesichtssinnes (Comparative Physiology of Vision) that invertebrates and fish were colour-blind.

He discovered that bees can recognize the desired compass direction in three different ways: by the Sun, by the polarization pattern of the blue sky, and by the Earth's magnetic field, whereby the Sun is used as the main compass, with the alternatives reserved for the conditions arising under cloudy skies or within a dark beehive.

Frisch proved that variations in the position of the Sun over the course of a day provided bees with an orientation tool.

They use this capability to obtain information about the progression of the day deep inside a dark beehive comparable to what is known from the position of the Sun.

If a bee knows the direction to a feeding place found during a morning excursion, it can also find the same location, as well as the precise time at which this source provides food, in the afternoon, based on the position of the sun.

What makes it so particularly striking and attractive is the way it infects the surrounding bees; those sitting next to the dancer start tripping after her, always trying to keep their outstretched feelers on close contact with the tip of her abdomen.

They take part in each of her manoeuvrings so that the dancer herself, in her mad wheeling movements, appears to carry behind her a perpetual comet's tail of bees.

The orientation functions so well that the bees can find a food source with the help of the waggle dance even if there are hindrances they must detour around like an intervening mountain.

Investigations with other varieties led to the discovery that language elements were variety-specific, so that how distance and direction information is relayed varies greatly.