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“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,...