Francis Bacon in 1620:
Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical. The former like ants only heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both, extracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts.

Karl von Frisch was always very critical of his own experimentation:
Always imagine that there are 5 observers standing around your experiment, and that they are trying to criticize everything you do with your bees.

This was highlighted by an event in 1914, at the congress of zoologists in Freiburg, when von Frisch presented "A demonstration of experiments to prove color perception in totally color blind animals". 

The color training of the bees was demonstrated in the open air, and it was reported that during the experiment, the bees alighted obediently on the empty blue cardboard. 

When they found it empty, one bee searched in the near vicinity and landed on the blue tie of one of the onlookers! This was enough to convince the congress members that bees were indeed capable of color perception.

PLB

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