As Charles Darwin was vacationing in the Bournemouth area in the autumn of 1862, he noticed an unfamiliar phenomenon. During his leisurely strolls around the clover fields that surrounded the cottage in which he and his family stayed, he observed how a certain kind of hive bee employed two different strategies to reach the nectar of the red clover flowers. Some, Darwin wrote, “rout about” in the head of the flower, as most bees do, while others bite through the corollas at the base of the flower to get to the nectar from the side. He wrote to his friend John Lubbock to ask for assistance in corroborating his hypothesis that these bees consisted of two different castes with, respectively, long and short proboscises. This never happened, though, for the next day Darwin sent a follow-up letter stating that his observation of the corolla-biting hive bee had been an embarrassing error: “I hate myself[,] I hate clover & I hate bees,” he wrote rather self-deprecatingly.

Across Natural Orders: The Enlightenment Discovery of Insect Pollination – JHI Blog