Disappearing bees land on Times front page

Honeybees accomplished today what would make celebrities and politicians envious.

They landed on the front page of the New York Times.

Stories began appearing in the news a couple of weeks ago about bees disappearing from hives. Today, it was the New York Times' turn.
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The story was centered in California and talked about a professional beekeeper who had lost half of his 4,200 hives -- and what that might mean for many of California's farmers.

The story was accompanied by a chart that showed how important bees are to pollination of certain crops. Bees, for instance, pollinate 100 percent of the almond crop, 90 percent of apples and blueberries, and they are the single most important pollinators of many other crops.

The story also contained an audio slide show.

That was truly coincidental because I had planned to talk to my web journalism class today about audio slide shows and how to produce them. I couldn't pass the bee story slide show up, and I showed it to my class. And they, clever rascals, began asking me a lot of questions about bees and relatively few about audio slide show production. They know how to get me off topic.

Wait til baseball season begins.