Karl von Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1973 to honour his work on animal behavior, especially his theory that honey bees communicate by a dance language.
Before he was awarded the Nobel prize, a zoologist named Adrian Wenner found that his own experiments went against von Frisch’s predictions. Wenner carried out his own experiments found that the bees were unable to locate the food source with dance alone. Wenner had his own theory that bees located a food source by odour, but subsequent to publishing his paper in Nature with his collaborator Wells (1973) he found himself barred for many years by the editors of major scientific publications from presenting his results. James Gould who also challenged Von Frisch conceded that the design of the experiments of von Frisch had been flawed. Once the dance language hypothesis was adopted by the scientific establishment in animal behaviour as a fact, all challenges to it were summarily brushed aside. Interesting stuff.
http://beesource.com/point-of-view/a...e-controversy/
http://www.uky.edu/Classes/ENT/568/G...20Language.pdf