In the spring of 1917, a young scientist named Karl von Frisch stepped onto a German hillside armed with a paint set and a beehive. He was about to embark on an experiment that would take 20 years of his life and challenge some of humanitys deepest held assumptions about the animal world.

The experiments crowning achievement was to decode the waggle dance, an erratic performance by honey bees that had confounded scientists since Aristotle first noted the phenomenon more than 2,000 years earlier.

Von Frischs painstaking observations proved that the dance was, in fact, a complex communication method, allowing bees to relay the precise location of food sources many miles from their colony. This begged the question: If insects could demonstrate such intelligence, were our assumptions about animal intellect fundamentally flawed?

The discovery earned von Frisch and two fellow naturalists the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.