Whose discovery first identified the role of honeybee waggle dances in communication?

Karl von Frisch, an Austrian ethologist, demonstrated in the 20th century that honeybees communicate through a dance language. His experiments showed that the angle of the waggle run indicates direction relative to the sun, while the duration of the dance gives distance information. This was one of the most important discoveries in animal behavior science. Von Frisch shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on social behavior in insects. His research transformed bees from simple instinct-driven creatures into animals with sophisticated communication systems.