Karl von Frisch. Portrait of Karl von Frisch (1886-1982), Austrian ethologist and zoologist. Frisch's main work was on the behaviour of bees. By training them to feed from an artificial source he was able to prove that they could make distinctions between odours, tastes and colours; He also showed that they can see ultraviolet light. In addition, he showed that bees commun- icate to each other by dancing. If a bee found food it would do a dance in the hive that showed the direction of the food with respect to the position of the Sun. Frisch was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.