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We have touched on this from time to time and it just seems to get worse. Honeybees, essential to farmers, gardeners and maybe to us all, are dying. What's worse, we still do not know exactly why it is happening. This is a site that stays on top of the situation.

The Hartford (Conn.) Courant says:

The number of beekeepers nationally is on the decline, while at the same time there is a soaring demand for pollination services. Over the past decade, beekeeping has become a big business, with some large-scale commercial beekeepers managing as many as 80,000 hives.

But the path to large-scale beekeeping has become a perilous one. The recent appearance of colony collapse disorder, an epidemic of unknown origin that is decimating the nation's honeybee population, has some scientists and beekeepers wondering whether the industry's movement to large-scale commercial operations is responsible for its spread.

Look at this story from the Kennebec (Maine) Journal:

Pollinating season for Maine crops is likely to begin in a couple of weeks, and prices for hives, set out on blueberry fields and apple orchards, are rising. Growers say the price of renting a hive has doubled -- from $50 a few years ago to more than $100 today.

Maine state bee inspector and apiarist Tony Jadczak said parasitic mites are a major cause of the die-off.

He said the mites arrived years ago from Asia, but bees seem more vulnerable than ever to the blood-suckers. Why bees are succumbing could be complicated, and could involve man-made stresses.

Honey producer Marc Plaisted of Pittston, a fourth-generation beekeeper, said that while honeybees were first brought to America by early settlers, later species brought the parasitic mites.

He said using bees to pollinate crops around the country spreads disease, even though he recognizes these same bees are essential to growing fruits and vegetables.

Jadczak, with 35 years of experience in the bee business, said the situation is far from hopeless, but may require human behavioral changes.

"We're the biggest problem," he said, citing stresses put on bees by moving them around a lot, by exposure to chemical pesticides, and by development.

Rick Cooper, a beekeeper in Bowdoinham, dismissed some of the recent media attention to bees as "hype."

He also scoffed at a report that cell phone transmission towers might be disorienting bees.

What's bothering bees, he said, is being trucked around the country from Florida citrus groves to California almond plantations to Maine blueberry barrens, and back to Florida.

"They're stressing the bees beyond belief," said Cooper, who said he takes his bees only short distances for pollinating. "It's absolutely about how the bees are being treated. We're doing more and more with fewer and fewer bees," he said.

National Public Radio also ran a story last week. Give it a listen.

According to testimony before Congress [PDF], honeybees are essential for the pollination of over 90 fruit and vegetable crops worldwide. The economic worth of the honeybee is more than $14.6 billion in the U.S.

What Would $456 Billion Buy?

In my reporting classes I often tell writers to use shapes not numbers when trying to explain large amounts of money. For example, what you could buy with $456 billion -- which is the new estimate of how much the war in Iraq will have cost by September.

The Boston Globe did a great job with this idea.

Street Spinners

The latest thing in advertising is "street spinners." These are folks with signs who stand on the side of the road, but are no longer content to just stand there. Click here to see a YouTube video of one guy, and you will get the idea. (Zoom through the first 1:30 to get to what you really want to see.)

Read this from the Los Angeles Times:

Street corner advertising on human billboards has existed for centuries, but Southern California -- where the weather allows sign spinners to work year-round -- has endowed the job with style.

Local spinners have cooked up hundreds of moves. There's the Helicopter, in which a spinner does a backbend on one hand while spinning a sign above his head. In the Blender, a spinner twirls the sign behind his back. Spanking the Horse gets the most attention. The spinner puts the sign between his legs, slaps his own behind and giddy-ups.

Thanks to growing demand, the business has turned cutthroat. There's a frenzy of talent poaching. Spinners battle one another for plum assignments and the promise of wage hikes. Some of the more prominent compete for bragging rights by posting videos on YouTube and Google Video, complete with trash talking. One YouTube comment reads, "I don't know if you stole my tricks or I just do them better."

A few weeks ago I was doing some teaching up in Destin, Fla., and I saw something I had only heard about before. Car washes are installing dog-wash stations. I love that.

I have seen this popping up around the country. Here is a story from Massachusetts.

Here is one from Akron, Ohio.

Newsrooms Tapping Community Knowledge

I had the good fortune to be in the presence of Peggy Girshman, National Public Radio's interactive-storytelling guru last week.

I was interested in Public Insight Journalism, which she said is being especially well used by Minnesota Public Radio.

MPR asks listeners to sign up as part of the Public Insight Network. Members list their experience, expertise and areas of deep knowledge. MPR explains what happens next:

Thanks to e-mail and the Internet, our radio producers and reporters can quickly find and learn from thousands of people who have experience or knowledge on a story we are covering. We call this the Public Insight Network, and it relies on people like you -- our public sources.

You have knowledge and insights that can help us cover the news in greater depth and uncover stories we might not otherwise find.

Some of our public sources end up in our radio programs. Others prefer to just help us get at the heart of a story. Nothing you share with us goes onto the radio or the Web without your clear permission. So please help us create the great stories that have made you a public radio listener.

Here are some examples of stories that took shape because of the network.

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends upon the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.