The Super Bowl of Beekeeping Almond growing in California is a $7.6 billion that wouldn’t be possible without the 30 billions bees (and hundreds of human beekeepers) who keep the trees pollinated — and whose very existence is in peril.
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Travis Bodell
Why did I pick this article? Article Summary In California, beekeeping and almond farming go hand-in-hand. Billions of bees are responsible for pollenating the almond trees, but there are a variety of outside forces threatening the population. The bees are effected by extreme weather due to the coastal climate, the inescapable devastation of mites and even the mysterious colony collapse disorder (C.C.D.)
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I was really attracted to the idea of hyper-dramatized photography of a subject matter that isn’t inherently dramatic. Photography in this feature is by Ilona Szwarc.
Word List RURAL RUSTIC BUSTLING CRUCIAL WORRIED SOLEMN
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Tool Kit 1 Headline and Opening Copy
Pull Quote
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Until you have a mite
THE SUPERBOWL OF
collapse and your bees actually go down, you don’t really learn how to treat
BEEKEEPING
Almond growing in California is a $7.6 billion that wouldn’t be possible without the 30 billions bees (and hundreds of human beekeepers) who keep the trees pollinated — and whose very existence is in peril.
for mites. A lot of guys go through hard times, get their butts kicked.” — LYLE JOHNSTON, COLORADO BEEKEEPER
BY JAMIE LOWE
Caption with Photo Credit
Ehenim si blabore sumendi ut ulleniatem laborit eum iduciis re sunt odissunt ditatenIfectuam am ia? Vehem adVivit? Pubit,
Opening Paragraph
PHOTO BY ILONA SZWARC
Every February, white petals blanket first the almond trees, then the floor of the central valley, an 18,000-square-mile expanse of California that begins at the stretch of highway known as the Grapevine just south of Bakersfield and reaches north to the foothills of the Cascades. The blooms represent the beginning of the valley’s growing season each year: Almond trees are first to bud, flower and fruit. At the base of the trunks sit splintered boxes — some marked with numbers, some with names, some with insignias — stacked two boxes high on a wooden pallet that fits four stacks. Inside the boxes are bees, dancing in circles and figure-eights and sometimes just waggling. With almond season comes bee season. Everyone in the valley knows when it’s bee season. There are bee-specific truckers; motels occupied by seasonal workers; annual dinners to welcome the out-of-towners; weathered pickups with license plates from Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and Florida parked in front of orchards at all hours of the night. And those ubiquitous boxes.
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Tool Kit 2 Headline
THE SUPERBOWL OF
Pull Quote
Photo Treatment
Lyle Joh n
ston , Be
ek ee pe r
Until you have a mite collapse and your bees actually go down, you don’t really learn
BEEKEEPING
how to treat for mites. A lot of guys go through hard times, get their butts kicked.”
BY JAMIE LOWE
Caption with Photo Credit Ehenim si blabore sumendi ut ulleniatem laborit eum iduciis re sunt odissunt ditatenIfectuam am ia? Vehem adVivit? Pubit, satem anum PHOTO BY ILONA SZWARC
Opening Paragraph Every February, white petals blanket first the almond trees, then the floor of the central valley, an 18,000-square-mile expanse of California that begins at the stretch of highway known as the Grapevine just south of Bakersfield and reaches north to the foothills of the Cascades. The blooms represent the beginning of the valley’s growing season each year: Almond trees are first to bud, flower and fruit. At the base of the trunks sit splintered boxes — some marked with numbers, some with names, some with insignias — stacked two boxes high on a wooden pallet that fits four stacks. Inside the boxes are bees, dancing in circles and figure-eights and sometimes just waggling. With almond season comes bee season. Everyone in the valley knows when it’s bee season. There are bee-specific truckers; motels occupied by seasonal workers; annual dinners to welcome the out-of-towners; weathered pickups with license plates from Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and Florida parked in front of orchards at all hours of the night. And those ubiquitous boxes.
VISC202 - Project 1
Travis Bodell
Tool Kit 3 Headline and Opening Copy
THE SUPERBOWL OF
BEEKEEPING
BY JAMIE LOWE
Almond growing in California is a $7.6 billion that wouldn’t be possible without the 30 billions bees (and hundreds of human beekeepers) who keep the trees pollinated — and whose very existence is in peril.
Text Treatment
Photo Treatment
Every February, white petals blanket first the almond trees, then the floor of the central valley, an 18,000-square-mile expanse of California that begins at the stretch of highway known as the Grapevine just south of Bakersfield and reaches north to the foothills of the Cascades. The blooms represent the beginning of the valley’s growing season each year: Almond trees are first to bud, flower and fruit. At the base of the trunks sit splintered boxes — some marked with numbers, some with names, some with insignias — stacked two boxes high on a wooden pallet that fits four stacks. Inside the boxes are bees, dancing in circles and figure-eights and sometimes just waggling. With almond season comes bee season. Everyone in the valley knows when it’s bee season. There are bee-specific truckers; motels occupied by seasonal workers; annual dinners to welcome the out-of-towners; weathered pickups with license plates from Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and Florida parked in front of orchards at all hours of the night. And those ubiquitous boxes. This year the beekeepers responsible for those bees gathered on a mid-February Saturday for a potluck lunch at a community center in Kerman, a small town of ranch houses wreathed by acres upon acres of almond orchards. The meeting was supposed to kick off the pollinating season, but the beekeepers, many of them wearing tuckedin plaid shirts and trucker caps with dirt-curled bills, had already been at work for a couple of weeks, summoned to the state early by a heat wave. The sun beckoned the blossoms, and the blossoms begged for the bees. Farmers have a window of just a few weeks when pollination has to happen, otherwise the nuts won’t set, which is what it’s called when blossoms are pollinated and kernels emerge. When the nuts don’t set, much of a crop can be lost. By the time of the potluck, it seemed as if the season were already at its midpoint. The beekeepers lined up to fill their paper plates with pork chops, baked beans, chicken, rice, salad and three different kinds of cake. Teri Solomon, the organizer of the event and a longtime local beekeeper, collected $10 each for lunch. A list of speakers was taped to the table where she sat — respected beekeepers, bee brokers, scientists, a Fresno County sheriff’s police detective and a rep from the Almond Board of California. Topics of the day included the steady growth of the almond industry, the science of pollination, agricultural theft (hence the cop) and the ever-more-imperiled state of honeybees. That last item carried the most weight with the crowd, as they were all struggling to maintain the vast numbers of bees needed for almond pollination. Bees are central to an enormous agricultural industry — about one of every three mouthfuls of food we eat wouldn’t exist without bee pollination — and beekeepers’ custodianship of billions of these delicate animals is as much an art as it is a science. Beekeepers themselves, Solomon confided, are funny creatures: solitary in the field, trying to anticipate the needs of a finicky insect and, unlike that insect, social only once in a while. “We’re an odd bunch, very individualistic in nature,” she said. “But we’re in trouble.”
Caption with Photo Credit
Pull Quote
Until you have a mite collapse and your bees actually go down, you don’t really learn how to treat for mites. A lot of guys go through hard times, get their butts kicked.”
Ehenim si blabore sumendi ut ulleniatem laborit eum iduciis re sunt odissunt ditatenIfectuam am ia? Vehem adVivit? Pubit, satem anum. Xerum explabo reiciam asperi omni. Photo Ilona Szwarc
— LYLE JOHNSTON, BEEKEEPER
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Me Expressing My Thoughts 2
Getting critiqued on the above spreads gave me a load of things to work on for the next round of drafts. Here are some of the things I learned/needed to work on:
- Columns were too wide apart. You can’t have gaps where trucks can fit! - My images aren’t functioning nearly as effectively as they should be. Many of them need to be scaled up and integrated with the entire spread rather than just being placed in the corner. - I need to hone in what my yellow circle means and how it will function within the spread as a whole. Will I use it in text? Will I use it as a framing device for images? Who knows! - None of the pullquote designs quite did it for me, come up with more!
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Front Cover
August 15, 2018
“If almonds went down, we wouldn’t be running bees.”
THE SUPER BOWL OF BEEKEEPING VISC202 - Project 1
Travis Bodell BY JAMIE LOWE