> I generally try to avoid flooding these pages with personal anecdotes...

Quotes from old forgotten books written in days decades before air-ride trailers, 1000-mile migration moves, varroa, and 50,000 hive operations are personal anecdotes retold.

Even the purported science of days gone by is, at best the mere observational notes of an individual, and thereby, an anecdote retold.

The advantage of a first-hand account is that there is nothing lost in the telling, as one is hearing directly from the person who experienced the event.  What makes it into a book often bears only a tenuous connection to the first draft first-hand account written in the own words of the person who was there.  

I wrote a book once, and rewrote, and rewrote for 3 more years after the first draft was done, and I declared it done when I was sick of it. (but that's yet another personal anecdote, isn’t it?)  Don't worry, the book was not about bees, as the last thing the world needs is yet another book about bees.  It was about data, and databases.

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