Guillermo Fernandez. The grandson of a farmer and beekeeper, Guillermo is a Marketing executive that has held key marketing roles at People, Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. He has been an urban bee keeper for nearly a decade, with honey as well as solitary bees.
His story begins in a neighborhood where one in three people lived in poverty, a “food desert”. Fast-food outlets were plentiful but fresh and organic food was many miles away. This personal experience shaped his belief that every person deserves access to healthy food, including the 29 million Americans living in a food desert.
Over time, his childhood experiences merged with his passion for beekeeping — now he has a lifelong commitment to advance public education about bees and to place bees in communities where they can thrive and pollinate locally grown food.
Nancy Rathbun Scott, Founder and principal of Liberty Communications Group, is a writer, editor, blogger, marketer, thinker, and social media pro. Nancy is the creator and editor of OurFoodNews and also curates the content for a daily newsletter of the same name. She has worked extensively with the American Nursery and Landscape Association and served for 11 years as the editor of ANLA’s monthly magazine and enewsletters. For seven years, Nancy wrote a weekly column on franchising for USA Today and recently retired her 17-year assignment as editor of Marketing AdVents, the award-winning monthly publication of the Direct Marketing Association of Washington D.C. Contact her.
Erica Vartanian is a philosopher who spends a lot of time in thought, but has decided it was time to put her beliefs in action. She is thrilled to have found a way to help promote local food systems and bee conservation through the Honeybee Conservancy. Thanks to the resources and inspiration of the HBC, she is now planning a new garden with native, pollinator-friendly plants. She is interested in urban planning, permaculture, and environmental/animal ethics. She also enjoys songwriting and hopes that someday her music could inspire tiny shifts in environmental awareness for listeners.
Emily Vander Ark is a writer getting her MFA from Spalding University. She works in a public library and teaches at a community college, but in her spare time she explores the beauty of surrounding southwest Michigan with her husband and a crazy dog. A vegetable gardening hobby led to her increased awareness of honeybees and their plight, and she dreams of someday keeping a hive. Visit Emily at emilyvanderark.com, or check out her blog at ibelonginabook.wordpress.com.
Kellen Henry is a beekeeper and digital journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. She currently has two hives with celebrity queens Beeyonce and Bee Arthur. Her hives are a project of Feedback Farms, a group that runs small-scale farming operations and develops systems and appropriate technology to overcome challenges of land tenancy, scale and labor in the city. Kellen is a native of West Virginia.
John Howe, founder of NYC beekeeping, is a longtime Brooklyn apiarist now living in Devon, England. A modern bee-whisperer, John is the the basis for Fred, the main character in the award-winning children’s book, The Honeybee Man. His hands-on program “The Buzz About Bees” brings bees in observation hives to schools to educate children about the role of bees in the environment.
Rebecca Louie is a journalist and content strategist. When she isn’t playing with her honeybees in the Catskills, she’s playing with her composting worms in Queens. To read more of her work, please visit rebeccalouie.com. To learn about her adventures in composting, head to thecompostess.com
James Zitting is a beekeeper in the Ozarks. Nudged by the economy, encouraged by his lovely wife Nikki, and inspired by the likes of Gene Logsden he has turned watching bees into a fulltime passion. James seeks to help others find and preserve local and genetically diverse bees. James teaches sustainable beekeeping and creates handmade hives for the hobbyist, homesteader, and lovers of bees and honey. See his constantly evolving designs at www.beelanding.com.
Joshua Rim attends Williams College, where he majors in Biology. He has a passion for the natural sciences with an interest in, among other things, bee physiology.
Michaela Medina is a pollinator-loving professional gardener, garden designer, photographer, coach and speaker. She is also a freelance garden writer and pens two lush blogs: The Gardener’s Eden and also Garden Variety: The Barnes & Noble Gardening Blog. She has worked as a garden designer and landscape horticulturalist in New England for more than a decade.
Dr Reese Halter, an award-winning conservation biologist, father and author with a recently published the book, The Incomparable Honeybee and the Economics of Pollination. Dr. Reese is the founder of Global Forest Science, an international charitable forest research foundation. Dr. Reese lives on the West Coast with his children and their Chesapeake Bay retriever, “Stoot,” and enjoys hiking, fishing, camping and telling stories around the campfire.
Ruby Sara is a poet, essayist and performance artist with a deep love for honeybees. Ruby holds a Masters degree in Theological Studies and writes about issues relating to earth-centered spirituality and contemporary paganism. Some of her most recent writing can be found in the anthologies Datura: An Anthology of Esoteric Poesis, and Devoted, both published by Scarlet Imprint.
Terry Meyer began beekeeping with two well-mannered, happy hives in 2004 upon her family’s move to a farmette in rural Virginia. After two relatively uneventful and blissfully honey-coated years, the troubles started … lost hives, colony collapse, mean bees, wax moths. She almost gave up, but at the last-minute this spring she dove in again in with crossed fingers, some brand new hiveware, and renewed hope. Terry is fascinated by the industriousness, resilience, and beauty of the honeybee and loves to observe and take pictures of her bees and other pollinators at work in her garden, and to simply stand near her hives and listen to the steady hum. She has been stung approximately 17 times … mostly during the mean bees episode.