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The length of the run is correlated with the distance of the food from the hive, while the angle of the bee's body relative to vertical indicates the angle between the sun and the food source. The vibrating wings of the dancing bee also convey auditory information to the rest of the hive; silenced bees do not recruit others to the food source, and it makes sense that sound would be needed, since the inside of the hive is dark and the other workers cannot simply watch what the dancer is doing. Once the dancer has completed her performance, other bees venture out of the hive and go, more or less directly, to the location she indicated.

In other words, the bees seem to have symbolic representations for the distance and direction of the food, which fits many if not all of the criteria for an actual language. This was big news. Historian of science Tania Munz points out that during the 1960s, bee language was "the most widely studied form of animal communication and some deemed it the most complex second only to human speech." Even Carl Jung took note, musing that we would interpret the bees' behavior, if it occurred in humans, "as a conscious and intentional act and can hardly imagine how anyone could prove in a court of law that it had taken place unconsciously.... Nor is there any proof that bees are unconscious." Those with a yearning to see the waggle dance for themselves need look no further than YouTube, of course; one video of a dancing bee had nearly eighty thousand hits, and enthusiastic if sometimes inadvertently ironic comments such as, "I couldn't do that. Bees are smarter than me," "Why would you shake your butt as communication, weird," or, even better, "Wow. Their [sic] smart."

Although von Frisch's discovery was mainly greeted with amazement and rather uncritical acceptance by both the general public and other scientists, a few remained skeptical that the bees were truly capable of using the sophisticated information encoded in the dances. Foremost among these was Adrian Wenner, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara—and, in the spirit of full disclosure, my former teacher and mentor as an undergraduate. A soft-spoken but determined man, Wenner did not dispute the information contained in the waggle dance; he could observe a returning forager and calculate the distance and direction of the food patch perfectly well himself. He just didn't think the bees were using the information.

Wenner claimed that a much simpler explanation for how the bees found the food existed: the other workers simply smelled the odor that lingered on the recruiter's body, left the hive and flew, sniffing the air, until they perceived the same scent emanating from a patch of flowers. The experiments that von Frisch and other scientists performed demonstrated merely that the bees found the food, he said, not how they did so. His hypothesis was much more parsimonious, and hence, Wenner concluded, scientists were obliged to use it rather than the more elaborate explanation that required talking bees. Why, then, did the bees dance, and why did the dance contain information that was interpretable by humans, if the bees didn't use it? Wenner would always smile an impish smile when asked that question, and point out that nature did not evolve for a purpose—to suggest that it did was teleological and unscientific. The dance didn't have to be used by the bees in the way we could use it; a cricket's call can be used to calculate the temperature because he sings more quickly when it is warmer, but no one has ever suggested that the crickets evolved their chirps so that they could act as thermometers.

Wenner's iconoclastic views were not particularly popular, which he also attributed to an unscientific bias toward wanting to believe the more dramatic and exciting story of an insect language. Eventually, however, scientists began to pit the two ideas against each other. To some extent, it is unfair to claim that von Frisch dismissed the use of odor cues by the bees, since he