The Language of the Bees: An Interview with Hugh Raffles →
“The western honeybee, misnamed Apis mellifera (“honey-carrier”) by Linnaeus who erroneously thought bees simply cull honey produced by flowers, is probably the most loved of all insects. And as one of the few “social insects,” it has been incorporated into folklore, mythology, poetry, and even political paradigms. Although the Egyptians were already keeping bees by the third millennium BCE, it was not until 1788 that the dance bees perform in the hive after finding a food source was finally observed. That the dance indicates precisely the location of food often miles away was not understood until the Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch deciphered its meaning in the 1940s. In 1973, von Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work.
Hugh Raffles, professor in the Department of Anthropology at the New School, is currently writing The Illustrated Insectopedia (forthcoming, Pantheon), an ambitious book in the form of an abecedarium exploring our variegated relationship with insects. The chapter on “L” is dedicated to “Language,” specifically to von Frisch’s work on decoding the dance of the bees. Sina Najafi met with Raffles to discuss his research.”
