When a bee returns from a more distant food source, she does what is called the Schwanzeltanz or the waggle dance. She wags her abdomen as she runs straight a short distance while making a rasping sound with her wings.She makes turns that create a figure-eight design. The movements of the dance indicate to the other bees in the hive where they must fly to find the food. Karl von Frisch was the first to decode the dances of the honeybees. As early as the 1940s, he found that honeybees can communicate the direction, distance, and quality of a food source to members of their hive through elaborate dances. Scientists have also discovered that the bees produce a hive-specific pheromone that they leave at the source of the nectar, helping to direct the other bees to the site. A pheromone is a chemical that is secreted by one individual and acts from a distance on another individual to alter that individual’s behavior. The scout bee also brings back the scent of the nectar itself, which further aids the other bees in locating the food source. So there are several indicators of where the food is located: the “dance,” the pheromone, and the odor of the food.

With his high G.P.A., nearly perfect SAT score and activities — debate team, tennis captain and state orchestra — Mr. Jia believes he should have had a fair shot at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. However, those Ivy League colleges rejected him after he applied in the fall of 2015. 

It was particularly disturbing, Mr. Jia said, when classmates with lower scores than his — but who were not Asian-American, like him — were admitted to those Ivy League institutions. 

“My gut reaction was that I was super disillusioned by how the whole system was set up,” Mr. Jia, said. 

Students like Mr. Jia are now the subject of a lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions by imposing a penalty for their high achievement and giving preferences to other racial minorities.