I agree with Randy - old books and papers have a wealth of  information.  
In older times, journals and books published observations  that would be 
rejected now as taking up too many pages, or pre-judged to be of  little or no 
value.
 
Now that I'm near the end of my career, I'm as bad as my mentors,  
complaining about lack of due diligence by younger researchers, who in this day  of 
electronics, ignore anything not on the internet, and who think any paper  
older than they are is of no interest or use.
 
On another thread, there was a discussion about misinformation and  
beekeeper mentors.  There is a lot of misinformation in the  'peer reviewed' books 
and papers - in part because of shortcuts taken -  read the abstract, not 
the paper; repeat what someone else claims.  Thus,  we see statements such as 
'bees don't have a very good sense of smell, not much  better than that of 
people, except for some pheromones and floral scents'  repeated over and 
over.  Yet, the first is a 1918 paper by Von Frisch and  his wife, where they 
sniffed scents (standing in for all of the rest of our  humans) and using a 
very crude means of presenting scents to bees, and the  second is from 
Ribbands, whose study refuted that of Von Frisch, but in being  quoted, is taken to 
support Von Frisch.
 
Jerry
 

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