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Munz s intellectual biography of the animal ethologist Karl von Frisch records his ingenious experimental demonstrations of the honeybee s communication dances. She skillfully places the history of twentieth-century science alongside its calamitous political history in a rich texture that weaves the civic operations of the hive with the gross incivilities of Nazi science, the irenic experimentalism of von Frisch with the violence of total war, and the narrow mechanism of American behaviorism with the latitude of its European counterpart. Von Frisch is a low-key hero of modern science, and the moving story of his discovery of honeybee language is almost as remarkable as the insect itself. --Claire Preston, author of Bee

The Dancing Bees will surely become a classic in the literature on the history of biology in the twentieth century. It is the definitive account of the intellectual development of Karl von Frisch and of his discoveries about the ability of honey bees to communicate with the waggle dance. Perhaps most fascinating is what Munz has uncovered about how von Frisch declared a Quarter Jew by the Nazis in 1941 was able to navigate a frightening political landscape in war-torn Germany, suffer the destruction of his Zoological Institute during the bombing of Munich, and still continue conducting experiments that revolutionized our thinking about animal communication. This book also provides intriguing insights into what von Frisch thought and felt during the heated debates about the meaning of the waggle dance in the 1960s and 1970s. --Thomas D. Seeley, author of Honeybee Democracy

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Tania Munz is the vice president for research and scholarship at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. Previously, she was a lecturer at Northwestern University and a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She holds a PhD in the history of science from Princeton University.

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