Free Republic

There’s a great article in Bari Weiss’ The Free Press that has great bearing on why consensus in science is often a bad thing, and how the consensus is enforced. Called "The Reason There’s Been No Cure for Alzheimer’s," it was written by Joanne Silberner, a former NPR reporter. What I loved about the article was its insightful reporting about how the scientific process works in practice, rather than how it should in theory. Most people have little idea how academic science works, what the incentives are, how peer review works, how money gets distributed, and all the minutia that...

Bee populations are under threat around the world, but one house in Spain apparently provided the perfect conditions for a huge hive. A couple in the historic southern city of Granada, in Andalusia, had been troubled by a strange buzzing noise in their house for some time -- and when things got so bad they couldn't sleep at night, they decided to take action. Beekeeper Sergio Guerrero told CNN the couple had first noticed bees at their property around a year ago, but no one from the police, firefighters or the local council had been able to help. When temperatures...

Three hives containing more than 180,000 bees in total were found intact on the cathedral’s roof despite the devastating blaze Following the tragedy of Monday’s fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, news came on Friday of a miracle as sweet as honey. The hundreds of thousands of bees that lived in hives inside Notre Dame’s roof are alive and well, according to the beekeeper, or apiculteur, that oversees them.... ...Three hives that are home to an estimated 60,000 bees each – 180,000 bees in total – are located on a lower roof atop the cathedral’s first floor.

“That is one pretty darn big nest,” said Ken Crayton, a retiree from Rochester, N.Y., showing it off in Thursday morning’s drizzle. “Oh, my goodness,” said Joan Hayes, the homeowners association vice president, peering at the big hive. “Never seen anything like it,” her husband Bill said. The Craytons had just returned last week from spending two months in Anderson, S.C., and invited their son and daughter-in-law for dinner. “We never noticed anything,” Crayton said. “But our son took their Jack Russell outside for a walk and said, ‘Holy jeepers! Look at the size of that nest up there!’ That’s...

NEWTON - The Republican vying for the only open congressional seat in Massachusetts says former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is "an entertainer" and he would decline any offer from her to campaign on his behalf.

Recently discovered beehives from ancient Israel 3,000 years ago appear to be the oldest evidence for beekeeping ever found, scientists reported. Archaeologists identified the remains of honeybees — including workers, drones, pupae, and larvae — inside about 30 clay cylinders thought to have been used as beehives at the site of Tel Rehov in the Jordan valley in northern Israel. This is the first such discovery from ancient times. "Although texts and wall paintings suggest that bees were kept in the Ancient Near East for the production of precious wax and honey, archaeological evidence for beekeeping has never been found,"...

Freepers: As usual, I try to find "experts" on certain issues here before I go searching for the "googled" or "wiki" answers.I have a large hive of honey bees (non-african) in my wall of my house. I have tolerated them for a wile (they have been there for four-five years), but this year they are much, much more numerous and I fear that the mold/mildew inside of my siding will be detrimental in the long run. I want to safely remove them without destroying the hive and transplant them to a bee box. Beekeeping has been one of my "learn...

The Bible refers to ancient Israel as the "land flowing with milk and honey," so it's fitting that one of its towns milked honey for all it was worth. Scientists have unearthed the remains of a large-scale beekeeping operation at a nearly 3,000-year-old Israeli site, which dates to the time of biblical accounts of King David and King Solomon. Excavations in northern Israel at a huge earthen mound called Tel Rehov revealed the Iron Age settlement. From 2005 to 2007, workers at Tel Rehov uncovered the oldest known remnants of human-made beehives, excavation director Amihai Mazar and colleagues report in...

Honeybees will die out in Britain within a decade as virulent diseases and parasites spread through the nation's hives, experts have warned. Whole colonies of bees are already being wiped out, with current methods of pest control unable to stop the problem. The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) said that if the crisis continued, honeybees would disappear completely from Britain by 2018, causing "calamitous" economic and environmental problems. It called on the Government to restart shelved research programmes and to fund new ones to try to save the insects. Tim Lovett, the association's president, said: "The situation has become insupportable and...

The Hive (Reprinted from SOBRAN’S, June 1999, page 3) Twenty years ago, I was struck by the way various sorts of political “progressives” — Communists, socialists, liberals, “civil libertarians,” “moderates,” “pragmatists” — all spontaneously cooperated with each other. It wasn’t a conspiracy; there was obviously no central direction. But the pattern was too clear to be denied. The word “left” was a dead metaphor; it said nothing interesting about the people it referred to. So I used the metaphor of an insect hive, which captured the way such people moved in harmony and communicated with each other. In a beehive,...