Meet The Speakers

Michael Bush is an internationally recognized author and speaker on beekeeping. He is the author of The Practical Beekeeper, Beekeeping Naturally, which has been published in five languages and is one of the authoritative sources on sustainable beekeeping without chemical treatments. His website is an invaluable source of information on natural, chemical-free beekeeping as well as beekeeping in general. The wisdom of his methods is evidenced by the fact that he successfully keeps bees through the harsh winters of Nebraska.

Ian Steppler is a beekeeper from Miami Manitoba Canada, who operates 1500 honey bee colonies within the family farm that manages a 4000 acres of crop land and a 650 cow calf operation.

Ian has been a director on the Manitoba Beekeepers Association since 2018 and is currently on his 4th year as chairman.

Ian has a YouTube channel called the Canadian Beekeepers Blog that has nearly 90,000 subscribers and over 34 million visits.

Ian is known for his dedication toward championing agriculture as he uses honey bees and our beekeeping industry to bring agriculture development and the natural environment closer together.

Ian has been invited all over the world to speak about beekeeping where he brings his perspective of the issues and provides his behind the scenes experiences of a Canadian beekeeping operation.

Dr. Liz Walsh has her dream job as a Research Scientist with the USDA-ARS laboratory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her work explore many topics and includes everything from working directly with commercial beekeepers on stock assessments within their own operations to designing integrated pest management strategies for disease. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Steve Pernal, of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, at the Beaverlodge Research Farm in Alberta. Liz's postdoc was spent exploring the links between honey bee health challenges and honey bee biomarkers as a part of the national BeeCSI project, but she also did work with AFB and chalkbrood exploring stock variation, asymptomatic vs. symptomatic infections, and more. This was all very different than her dissertation work, which was done at Texas A&M University with Dr. Juliana Rangel where Liz explored the impact of miticide exposure in immature queens. Liz is pleased to be at the end of her "teenage" years as a beekeeper, since she began keeping bees as a young high school student in her home state of Wisconsin, and is proud to serve the beekeeping industry through her research initiatives.

Liz is currently working on various projects which include examining: non-genetic temperament responses in various honey bee stocks, drone reproductive health and biology, queen reproductive health after stressor exposure, and honey bee variation in responses to pathogens (chalkbrood and Nosema).”

Phoebe Snyder began her journey in beekeeping in 2015 and has worked bees ever since. Snyder graduated with her B.S. in Biology in 2018 from Stevenson University then worked as a lab assistant at the USDA Bee Research Lab in Beltsville, MD. In the same year, Snyder began her master’s studies at UNC Greensboro studying honey bee group size effects on hygienic behavior performance. Snyder conducted a portion of her thesis work in Israel in 2019. After graduating with her M.S. in Biology in December 2020, Snyder gained extensive industry experience through her roles as Technical Sales Representative for a hive tracking software company and COO of Optera, a start-up she co-founded to commercialize UBeeO, a novel hygienic behavior selection test she launched in early 2024. Snyder is currently the Regional Manager, Beekeeper Relations for Dalan Animal Health where she is working to facilitate industry uptake of a honey bee vaccine. In addition to this role, Snyder teaches beekeeping as an adjunct professor at Guilford College and owns and operates her beekeeping business, Phoebe’s Bees.

Jay Evans is a Lead Scientist with the USDA-ARS Bee Research Laboratory (Beltsville, MD) He started studying insect colonies in college (Princeton University) and graduate school (University of Utah) while pursuing degrees in genetics and behavior. His research revolves around interactions between bees and the pathogens and parasites that torment them. He is especially focused on safe medicines and management strategies to reduce the impacts of bee disease. Along with trying to push the needle towards better honey bee survival, he argues that honey bees are a key part of human lives worldwide, as a form of equitable farming that gives much from small initial investments. He is thus keen on promoting honey bees and beekeeping as a sustainable part of nature and human health. He has received USDA awards for ‘Early Career’ (2003) and ‘Senior’ (2023) Scientist of the Year, the EAS James Hambleton Award for Bee Research, and is a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He writes a monthly research column for Bee Culture magazine (www.beesfoundintranslation.org

Peggy DeSanto is a cofounder of the Hive Hugger winterization system. This insulation system is founded in science and is unique in that it is based on the condensing hive approach. The product won the 2023 American Beekeeping Federation Award for Best Innovation and was awarded the University of Minnesota SARE Grant. Peggy serves on the Board the Directors of the U of M Hobbyist Beekeepers Association. She presented at the Wisconsin Honey Producers Conference in 2023 and will be hosting a breakout session at the Iowa Honey Producers Conference this fall.

The name of the presentation is: The Condensing Hive Vs. the Vented Hive and an Intro to the Hive Hugger Winterization System

Hannah Gaines Day is a Research Scientist in the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the influence of local and landscape scale resources on the health and behavior of managed and wild bees in agroecosystems. She has been working with Wisconsin beekeepers since 2018 and has been involved with wild bee research since 2004. This year she can be found collecting pollen from honey bee hives in apple orchards, cranberry marshes, and pumpkin fields across central and southern Wisconsin. She earned her MS and PhD at the UW-Madison. Her favorite part of her job is interacting with growers and beekeepers.

Randy Oliver sees beekeeping through the eyes of a biologist. He now helps his sons to run a commercial beekeeping operation of around 1500 hives in the foothills of Northern California, managing them for migratory pollination, nuc sales, and queen and honey production -- freeing Randy to engage in full-time in beekeeper-funded research projects. Randy analyzes and digests the scientific research, and is in touch with beekeepers and researchers from all over the world, not only to broaden his own depth of knowledge, but to figure out best management practices for beekeepers everywhere, which he then happily shares through his various articles in bee magazines, speaking engagements, and on his website: www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

Trevor Bawden, Researcher / lab manager of the Cook Honey Bee Lab at Marquette University. His current operation includes colonies spread across six apiaries in southeastern Wisconsin. The focus of the business is nucleus colony production and queen breeding. The thrust of the operation is helping educate and provide sustainable beekeeping and facilitate independence within the Wisconsin beekeeping community. The goal of elevating the quality of the queens produced in Wisconsin revolves through the breeding program at Lloyd Street bees. Part of this breeding program is the production of instrumentally inseminated VSH queens and selectioning here in WI. Contact Trevor via lloydstbees.com

Stephanie Slater is the owner of Jam Session Honey and Preserves and has been keeping honey bees in Walworth County (Wisconsin) for eight years.  She currently serves on the boards of the Walworth County Beekeepers Association, the Wisconsin Honey Producers Association, and the American Beekeeping Federation.  She is the 2022 Wisconsin Beekeeper of the Year, the 2023 American Honey Show Best of Show winner, and an American Honey Show Training Council Certified Honey Judge.  Do you want to know more about honey shows?  Are you interested in learning how you can prepare your hive products for honey shows?  This workshop will be a discussion on preparing honey and beeswax entries for competition.  Come prepared with all of your honey show questions.  You can find Jam Session Honey and Preserves on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jamsessionhoney or www.awardwinninghoney.com.

Charlie Koenen
More than two decades ago, Charlie left a company he founded teaching people to “Think Different” about Apple Computers, to start thinking different about Bees. He began developing an alternative to the stacked box hive. Six years later “CharBee” introduced the first Vented Top Bar Hive System and paralleled it with a training curriculum that not only taught beekeeping, but also emphasized education and advocacy of “what’s going on with the bees.” 

BeeVangelizing has become CharBee’s mission. As Director of Beevangelists, an organization with a bee-centric vision regarding the plight of bees and the need to regenerate thriving pollinator communities in urban environments and beyond. Pursuant to a trip to Slovenia, he became an advocate for eastern european beekeeping practices using AZ hive houses and Layens insulated box designs.

Over the years, Charlie has foraged close relationships with many private, public and religious organizations interested in promoting pollination in their spaces.  Whether hosting hives, leading bee parades or programatic curriculum, he shows how bees became the glue that binds communities together through their unique biology and their bringing abundance to nature’s bloom. He is President of the Milwaukee Waukesha Beekeepers Association, SE Wisconsin District Chair of Wisconsin Honey Producers Association, Former State Bee Inspector, Educator, Advocate and bee slinger for Heritage Honeybees, one of the nation’s largest bee distibuters right here in Sullivan Wisconsin. He heads up an organization called BeeVangelists which “Preaches the Gospel of Abundance According to Bees”

Ben Sallmann is the owner of Honey Bee Health Specialists LLC, which provides health monitoring, breeder selection, and consultation services to commercial beekeepers and researchers across the county. Ben grew up in a beekeeping family in SE Wisconsin, and gained much of his commercial beekeeping experience while working for the Bee Informed Partnership’s Tech Transfer Team. HBHS continues the Tech Team’s goal of collecting, interpreting, and distributing longitudinal colony health data, while providing context to the numbers. Beekeepers appreciate the 3rd party objective colony health assessments and seeing anonymized reports showing where they stand compared to other operations.

When not on the road inspecting colonies, Ben keeps busy propagating rare plants, playing trombone, and is in the process of starting a berry farm and small-scale VSH queen breeding project in Darien, WI. He looks forward to getting reacquainted with Wisconsin and the local beekeepers after living out of state for 20+ years.

Steve Cantley's career path has been a winding one. Armed with a physics degree from Michigan State, he's worked in semiconductor manufacturing, helped construct the International Space Station from inside NASA’s Mission Control Center, and even helped build science infrastructure at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. After all that, he met BroodMinder’s founder while both worked at a product development firm in Madison.

As a kid, Steve's beekeeping dreams were nixed by the family doctor's stern warning about his severe seasonal hay fever. Fast forward some improvements in allergy treatment, and Steve got his first hive in 2014. Dr. White got the last laugh though, because a couple of years later a bad reaction to a sting revealed a new allergy, and Steve now wears a full bee suit. Including in August.

These days, he focuses on the development of a passive internal Varroa mite counter at BroodMinder, joining his technical background with a lifelong AI fascination. Space Stations, beehives, and memory chips – they’re all interesting in different ways, and all part of a rewarding journey.

Russell Heitkam

 Russell is a second generation beekeeper & Northern California Queen Producer. Russell is on the Board of Directors for Project Apis m. He will be giving an update on projects & research that Project Apis m. funds.

James Lee

James Lee is the President of the Sustainable Beekeepers Guild of Michigan, a virtual educational organization with over 650 local and international members. He is also the founder of the Northern Queen Initiative and owner of James Lee's Bees in Romulus, MI where he lives with his wife Rachel and their 5 children. James manages 60-100 colonies pursuing sustainability in apiculture and produces nucs and queens with a focus on hardy Northern climate survivors selected for mite-resistance.