It seems odd, but, doesn't anyone know about using hibernate and session beans in general?
Well, the Hibernate documentation does. A session is:
an inexpensive, non-threadsafe object that should be used once, for a single business process, and then discarded.
Think about how session stateless beans work and how you could get access to a session created in one from another. Passing the session about between
EJB methods would crucify performance - since the session is also the first level cache and if the beans are remote the container would have to serialize the
entire first level cache to call another method.
The documentation actually says if you are using a session with session beans each business method should open, close and flush a session.