In the 1920s, an Austrian zoologist named Karl von Frisch embarked upon what became a lifelong passion for spying on bees. He went on to win a Nobel Prize for his discovery and description of the honeybee's food dance, perhaps the most celebrated example of animal communication in the wild. Von Frisch, while at the University of Munich, created special beehives with glass windows, permitting him to look in on the happenings of the hive.
Bees live in total darkness while inside the hive.
They also are virtually deaf. Therefore, touch, not sight or sound, is the principal sense they rely upon to communicate with other individuals. Worker bees, von Frisch observed, perform either circular or figure-eight dances upon returning to the hive from a find. As it turns out, circular dances communicate to adjacent bees the location of sources of food less than about one hundred yards away. Dances are performed on the vertical plane of the interior hive.