Contributors

NewEdColby-150x150

Ed Colby

Ed Colby and his gal Marilyn live and keep bees in Western Colorado.

 

 


JimTew-150x150

Jim Tew

Dr. James E. Tew is the beekeeping specialist for the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, Auburn University and emeritus professor, The Ohio State University. Jim has taught classes, provided extension services, and conducted applied research on honey bees and honey bee behavior. Additionally, he continues to contribute monthly articles for Bee Culture Magazine and other publications. He has authored: Beekeeping Principles, Backyard Beekeeping, Bee, Wisdom for Beekeepers, and The Beekeeper’s Problem Solver. He is a frequent speaker at state and national meetings and has traveled extensively to observe beekeeping techniques.


Ross Conrad

Ross has been learning, living and teaching bees since 1992. He learned his craft from world-renowned beekeeper and apitherapist, Charles Mraz, and Charlie’s son Bill. Conrad is a former president of the Vermont Beekeeper’s Association, a regular contributor to Bee Culture magazine, author of the first book on organic beekeeping to be published in the U.S., Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches To Modern Apiculture, and co-author of The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont. Ross regularly leads bee related presentations and organic beekeeping workshops and classes throughout North America. His human-scale beekeeping business Dancing Bee Gardens, sells honey and candles among other bee related products directly to friends, neighbors, and the local community.


KimLehman-150x150

Kim Lehman

Kim is a beekeeper and bee educator. She founded and coordinated the Kids and Bees Program, an informative program about honeybees for the public, at the American Beekeeping Federation Conventions in 15 states. As part of the Kids Page in Bee Culture magazine, Kim began a kids club called Bee Buddies and has members in every state. Her fun, educational honey bee programs include music, participation and hands-on activities. Kim is celebrating many years of working as a teacher, professional storyteller, musician, and puppeteer. Currently on the Texas Commission on the Arts Touring Roster, Kim has performed at hundreds of festivals, schools, libraries, and museums including being a featured teller at the Texas Storytelling Festival. Kim is in demand throughout Texas as an effective workshop presenter with practical, inexpensive program ideas on music, stories, crafts and puppets for librarians, teachers and parents.


Clarence Collison

Clarence is an Emeritus Professor of Entomology and Emeritus Head of the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, having retired from the position June 30th, 2010. Prior to assuming this position at Mississippi State University in March 1989, he was an extension entomologist at The Pennsylvania State University where he served as a beekeeping/pollination specialist and livestock entomologist. Clarence grew up on a dairy farm in southern Michigan where he became interested in entomology through 4-H. He first became interested in beekeeping when he took an apiculture class, as a junior at Michigan State University. His Bachelor of Science (Entomology, 1968), Master of Science (Entomology, 1973) and Ph.D. (Entomology, 1976) degrees were from Michigan State University. Both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees specialized in Apiculture; studying nectar secretion and factors affecting bee behavior and pollination of pickling cucumbers. He has taught apiculture at Michigan State University and The Pennsylvania State University. His areas of research emphasis were concerned with the effects of insecticidal sprays on honey bee foraging, factors that regulate drone production in honey bee colonies, pollination of birdsfoot trefoil and the distribution of varroa mites within the colony. He served as the major professor of 8 graduate students while he was at Penn State. From 1981 to 1989 and from 2000 to 2011 he chaired the Eastern Apicultural Society committee that developed the Master Beekeeper Exams and conducted the testing program. He writes the monthly column “A Closer Look” and prior to that “Do You Know?” for Bee Culture, speaks at numerous workshops and frequently judges honey shows. His book “What Do You Know?” was published in 2003. He and his wife Sally live in Estill Springs, TN and have three sons; Craig, Keith, and Eric and have nine grandchildren.


Dr. Tracy Farone

Dr. Tracy Farone, DVM is a Professor of Biology at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. She has worked in various areas of private practice, academia, and/or research for over 23 years.

Since late 2016, Dr. Farone has been researching beekeeping and bee medicine. She was granted a sabbatical to allow additional time to pursue apicultural studies and develop a teaching and research apiary at her college. In 2019, Dr. Farone worked in the field with dozens of back yard, sideline, commercial beekeepers, and bee researchers, both in the US and abroad.

Dr. Farone gives bee lectures for universities, veterinary associations, and various bee clubs around the country. She writes articles on bee medicine, including a monthly “Bee Vet” series for Bee Culture Magazine, written biosecurity industry guidelines for veterinarians entering bee yards in the US and developed an educational website, https://www.gccbeeproject.com/ . Dr. Farone’s work has also been featured in the JAVMA and Veterinary Clinics. She consults nationally and internationally with industry stakeholders, including sitting on two AVMA committees representing honey bees. Dr. Farone manages two honey bee yards and a PSU pollinator friendly garden with the help of her GCC bee project research students.


John Miller

John Miller is a retired, but active fourth-generation beekeeper.  He now devotes his life to grandchildren, bee research and forage initiatives.  The fifth generation of Miller’s now owns and operates Miller Honey Farms, based in Gackle, N.D. & Newcastle, CA.  John is a former two-term Chair of the National Honey Board, and President of the California State Beekeepers Assn., and currently is President of the N.D. Beekeepers Assn, which funds more bee research than any state organization in America  John has lived the American migratory beekeeping experience as profiled in The Beekeepers Lament, by Hannah Nordhaus.  He authors a monthly article in Bee Culture Magazine.  He is Poppa to 11 grandchildren.


David Burns

David started beekeeping in the early 1990s and started a beekeeping business several years later. In 2006 David began blogging and uploading beekeeping videos to YouTube. His YouTube channel has grown to around 135,000 subscribers. He also produces a weekly beekeeping podcast.

In 2020 David & Sheri were approached by Rockridge press to write the book “Backyard Beekeeping: Everything You Need to Know to Start Your First Hive.”

He has produced a suite of online beekeeping courses that have become very popular among new beekeepers.

David produces queens, nucs and packages. In order to make sure beekeepers had the best and latest scientific information on bees and beekeeping, David became a Certified Master Beekeeper through the Eastern Apicultural Society (2010). He also writes a monthly column for Bee Culture Magazine.

David teaches beekeeping workshops all year at their Training Center in Fairmount, IL. He also has a mentorship program known as Beeteam6, talks throughout the country at beekeeping conferences and is heard frequently on radio shows and podcasts.


Richard Wahl

I have been working with bees since 2010 when a swarm landed in a backyard pine tree. My intent to give them to a local beekeeper changed when he said “or you can give it a try if you would like.”  He let me keep that first, well used “last spare deep” of his and over-night I became a beekeeper.  With no prior knowledge and not owning any beekeeping equipment I naively thought “How hard could it be?”  I slowly improved my success rate during those early “school of hard knocks” years, overwintering at least one hive every year as I learned more about beekeeping.  My monthly articles for Bee Culture magazine are based on many of those early wrong assumption mistakes (which I now refer to as learning experiences) and are aimed at new beekeepers titled “Off the Wahl Beekeeping”.  I have slowly worked toward a 100% overwintered survival rate in recently past years.  I also serve as an instructor for new beekeepers at the Southeast Michigan Beekeeper Association (SEMBA) Bowers Beekeeping School.  I am an active member of 7 Ponds Bee Club, SEMBA and the MBA.  I have been a guest speaker giving presentations at various local bee clubs and area conferences.  My Bachelor’s degree is in Mathematics and Secondary Education Teaching with a Master’s Degree in Management Sciences.


Dr. Jay Evans

Dr. Jay Evans has had a fondness for honey bees and beekeepers for nearly 30 years. He is a Lead Scientist in the US Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory (Beltsville, MD) and is interested in the ways resources, stress, and disease affect honey bee health. Recent work in his group has focused on safe medicines to reduce the impacts of bee disease and the genetics of bees and their non-human associates.  He has enjoyed mentoring dozens of students and professional researchers and meeting with and learning from thousands of bees and beekeepers.


Nina Bagley

Nina Bagley has been an urban beekeeper in Columbus, Ohio for twenty years. Nina worked with a master beekeeper for eight years, raising queens. She has several apiaries in the city, growing her queens and Ohio Queen Bee LLC business. Nina has completed Dr. Joe Latshaw’s instrumental insemination class. She completed the Master Beekeeping class taught by Dr. Jerry Bromenshank through the University of Montana. Nina avidly collects early bee books and history from the 1800s. She’s an author published in Bee Culture Magazine on Bees and Women. For ten years, Nina has managed the Bee Pavilion at the Ohio State Fair, sponsored by OSBA. She oversees the State House bees and the Franklin Park Conservatory bees. She also manages the Frank Fetch Park Bees. 2010 was the first pilot hive in a park in downtown Columbus, Ohio. She is currently the Franklin County Bee Inspector for Ohio. Nina often mentors the inner city kids, educating them on the importance of honey bees.


Stephen Bishop

Stephen Bishop is a writer of humor, often specializing in agricultural antics. For his day job, he works at his local agriculture office and has met many outstanding farmers, a few middling to fair, and one or two outright scoundrels. Having kept bees for nearly fifteen years, he has nearly perfected his swatting and flailing routine. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Grit, Acres USA, Hobby Farms, Southeast Farm Press, Bee Culture, Country, American Bee Journal, Out Here, South Carolina Wildlife, and The Small Farmer’s Journal. He lives in Shelby, NC, with his wife and son on the old-family farmstead.


John Martin

I was born in Elyria, Ohio in 1956. As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a cartoonist. More specifically, I wanted to have a syndicated comic strip in the newspapers. Little did I know how hard that dream would be to come true.
Growing up you could always find me in my room drawing. Creating my own little comic books and cartoons. I had my first cartoon published in the Avon Lake Press in 1980. As I began to send out submissions to the syndicates,  the difficulty of landing a contract began to become real as the rejection letters followed. I understood that they receive thousands of submissions each month, with only a couple picked up for syndication, but surely my comic strips would beat those odds.  Oh the joy of youthful naivety. But I continued to submit my work because I remember even Charles Shultz (creator of Peanuts) was rejected many times before  “Peanuts” sold.
Over the years I have created many different comic strips, which while still submitting to the syndicates, I decided to try the self-syndication route. I finally found some success with a strip called SHOPPERS, which was published in a weekly paper beginning in 1986.  A year later, SHOPPERS was picked up by a local art/poster company called Bio-Graphics. It was run by a man named Ted Trikilis, who happened to be the man behind the now famous Farrah Fawcett red swimsuit poster. SHOPPERS continued to be published weekly, while Bio-Graphics worked behind the scenes creating a poster tie- in for the strip. In 1989 Bio-Graphics released a humorous poster called “$3.00 Worth of Shopping Tips” which I created for them. And yes, it sold for $3.00 each. Unfortunately SHOPPERS  also came to an end in 1989, as the paper stopped publishing my strip.
Around that same time, I had been working on two other strips going the self-syndication plan. One called YOUNG AT HEART for the senior papers and the other THOU SHALT LAUGH for religious papers. Between those two strips I managed to get them in about 11 papers across the country. Both those strips eventually ceased publication due to the papers folding around 1988 and 1999 respectively.
I created a new comic called BEEZWAX in 1991. It was a humor strip about a family of anthropomorphic honey bees and how they see life. It began running in the Medina Town Square Post the same year. BEEZWAX would continue to run in that paper for 7 years until once again, the paper folded for economic reasons.
All during this time remember, I was submitting strips to the syndicated without success. And after all those years of not finding syndication, and a box full of rejection letters, I felt a little discouraged. Maybe even a little burned out. So I put down my drawing pencil and decided to take a break, but still drew for myself.
Fast forward to 2014. I was invited to the cartoon studio of cartoonist Tom Batiuk of Funky Winkerbean & Crankshaft fame. I had a wonderful visit and felt like a kid in a candy store as we talked about comics and he showed me around his studio. I left with the cartoon bug burning inside of me again. For you see, cartooning is my passion and I live by the motto by cartoonist Ken Muse: “There is a fire inside of some people that have no other choice but to be a cartoonist”.
Times had changed, and web comics were all the rage now. So I began to look over my past work and decided to redesign and re-boot  BEEZWAX  for the computer age. After 6 months of planning I launched BEEZWAX 2.0 on January 12, 2015 online. At the same time, I used my old plan of self syndication to send out the strip to the papers. Before long,   8 papers picked up BEEZWAX. As of today, BEEZWAX has appeared in over 65 papers & publications across the country in over 20 different states. Six months later after launching BEEZWAX 2.0 I got a call from  BEE CULTURE magazine asking me if I’d like to draw a monthly comic strip for them. And through submitting BEEZWAX to the papers I have had offers for other cartoon work which I freely welcome.
After retiring from my day job working as a lab technician in the paint business for 38 years in 2022, I now can devote all of my time to cartooning. Besides doing various freelance cartooning and working on my strips for publication, I recently created the new strip GRANDPA SEZ for the senior newspaper market.  At my age, I now relate more to that market.
GRANDPA SEZ was launched the self syndication avenue in 2019 and now appears in 19 papers across the country including one in Canada.
Am I done with seeking that syndication contract? Not on your life. I have few more ideas up my sleeve.
Who am I? I’m just a guy who has a passion for cartooning and a never give up attitude for comic success that would like to put a smile on your face. See you in the funny papers. For more information or to just talk, contact me at beezwaxcomic@yahoo.com. Or check out my website at https://beezwaxcomic.wixsite.com/beezwax