APIS ARBOREA - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Digital Design and Development
Ben grew up with parents that loved bees, kept a small hive, and often included him in their tending. It was in this environment that Ben developed a love and respect for these vital pollinators and their complex societies.
Today, Ben extends that interest into working with Apis Arborea which is committed to education and advocacy. He is responsible for the digital technology behind the Apis Arborea projects.
Ben envisions a future where bee populations are robust and resilient, buzzing harmoniously across the landscapes they help to flourish.
Cameron Nielsen is a documentary filmmaker and bee enthusiast. His journey with bees started from a young age under the mentorship of Michael Thiele. Cameron explored the question, "how can you engage people with the importance of honeybees?" during his interdisciplinary undergraduate studies at Quest University Canada. This led him get a masters in documentary filmmaking from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He made an award winning documentary film ‘Rewilding Honeybees' about the work of Apis Arborea. Cameron is currently working as a cinematographer and editor at Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Conner's experience with honey bees lies primarily in the field of animal husbandry. His work experience has consisted of the management of small, minimally invasive apiaries with the health of the honey bee as the center focus. His work with Apis Arborea is that of monitoring wild honey bee nests living in trees. He embraces the opportunity to work with honey bees in both the field of animal husbandry and wilding. He graduated from Prescott College with a Bachelor of Arts and Humanities and is currently integrating his former passion for ceramics into his current pursuit of woodworking.
Benjamin is a honeybee researcher who works on honeybee ecology with a special focus on colonies living in the wild, their foraging resources, and their nesting sites. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Würzburg in 2022 and is now continuing his studies on wild colonies supported by a scholarship from the Graduate school of life sciences in Würzburg. In his first study in 2018, he did pioneering research on colonies living in two protected forest areas in Germany. He did research abroad including in Poland, in South Africa, and in India. His research was awarded several scholarships and research grants. He is one of the founding members of the BEEtree-Monitor (www.beetrees.org) and of the non-profit research association "Bees in Trees e.V.". Besides honeybee science, he is interested in sustainability, especially community-supported agriculture and urban gardening. (Picture courtesy of Ingo Arndt)
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Treasurer
I am very pleased to serve as a Board Member for Apis Arborea, in service of ecological restoration through re-wilding honeybees.
My main interests lie in human and ecological health. Having served as a front-line medical doctor in underserved communities for 25 years, I know well the impact of our deteriorating biosphere on vulnerable populations. Combining these professional health experiences with some time living in permaculture and other collective action communities has fostered a deep interest in working to find healthy solutions to the mess we are in and to supporting the structural pillars that will keep our biosphere functioning. Michael's relationship to the pollinating bees, and the organization he has founded, will be a potent force for regeneration of the ecosystem, and I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to this noble, visionary effort.
Elizabeth has worked at the intersection of food, climate, and agriculture for the past fifteen years. She is Chief Strategy Officer for Mad Agriculture, a non-profit that works with farmers as agents of change to move from extractive, conventional agriculture to regenerative, organic farming. The Mad! ecosystem of companies provides land and business planning, farmer forward financing, marketplace development, and storytelling. Elizabeth's role is to implement strategic initiatives in collaboration with our diverse network of partners in order to accelerate systematic change in our food system and help spark the regenerative revolution in agriculture. In her prior role as President of Demeter USA, the exclusive domestic certifier of Biodynamic farms and products, Elizabeth focused on expanding awareness and markets to enhance returns for regenerative farmers. She began her career in the California wine industry, where she spent nearly two decades in increasingly senior positions, with a growing emphasis on the environment. Elizabeth speaks frequently at national food and environmental conferences, and has written extensively on agriculture and climate change.
Georgi is a traveler along the paths of technology and life with experience in architecture, engineering, mentoring, emotional intelligence, and the sorts… Interested in technology, people, and life fundamentals applied in technology. At present, he is a Senior Network Architect in Salesforce.com for the last 9 years. His responsibilities include researching the field of networking, communications, cloud, and security and charting the long-term strategy for the company in these fields. Some years ago he got a TreeNest in his garden and as he half-jokingly half seriously tells people - the bees started keeping us. He has explored different dimensions of bees and is convinced that they hold a key piece to our growth and understanding of the world and ourselves.
Gia has spent the past two decades as a creative entrepreneur in Kauai and her native Northern California. As COO, she is honored to offer her unique and diverse skillset to the organizational development of Apis Arborea. With a deep reverence for Apian wisdom and the infinite possibilities for advancement in the field of apiculture, Gia is committed to bringing this awareness more deeply into the foundation of the organization, through innovative approaches to strategic planning, operations and creative collaborations. She is grateful for the opportunity to be of service in a meaningful way in this world and humbly calls the bountiful wild west of Sonoma County home.
Jennifer's marketing communications, branding, design and analytics experience spans decades and multiple industries, of which wine was the most fun. Jennifer founded and led Ensemble Marketing, a strategic marketing and design agency creating engaging stories and experiences for winery clients. Since turning over the reins to her expert colleagues in 2023, Jennifer has dedicated herself to climate action and education through collaborations with Napa Green, Back to Earth, Apis Arborea and others, finding joy giving back and communing with her pollinator-filled garden.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Secretary
Leslie lives with her husband Michael and two children in Sebastopol. Leslie has a B.A. in History from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She studied Zen Buddhism in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi at San Francisco Zen Center, both at Green Gulch Farm and Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery where she lived in residential practice for ten years. Leslie currently works on the Marketing team for Enso Village, the first Zen-inspired senior living community being built in Healdsburg CA.
Maya Pace is from the redwoods of Northern California. She currently works with Trust Labs as the Director of Curriculum as an independent consultant, designing and facilitating workshops on the adaptive challenge of belonging. Prior to this most recent chapter, she traveled across the US as a Harvard University Sheldon Fellow talking to people impacted by our changing climates about how natural disasters have shaped their relationship to place. She graduated from Harvard Divinity School with a Masters of Theological Studies after working as the founding Chief Program Officer of Lead For America, an organization that equips young people to build capacity in their hometowns. Maya has a background in facilitation, group dynamics, coaching, peace building, and hospital chaplaincy. She orients her work around the question: how do we live well together?
Michael's pioneering approach to apiculture and honeybee conservation has appeared in national and international magazines, books and films. He has presented his work at Harvard University & New York University, consulted for the USDA, and in 2006 developed the organization Gaia Bees to advance biodynamic practices in apiculture.
In 2017 he founded Apis Arborea to preserve the life and resiliency of honeybees through wilding, that is, the promotion of self-willed ecological processes, and the use of a holistic, system- and science-based framework in working with bees. He offers workshops and training in the U.S. and internationally.
Michael was born and educated in Germany. He lives with his family, and an infinity of bees, in the oak woodlands of Northern California.
Ollie Visick is a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of Sussex, UK, studying wild honey bee colonies under the supervision of Professor Francis Ratnieks. His main areas of research are wild colony density and nest site availability. He has reviewed the colony density literature and conducted his own surveys in southeast England. He is monitoring over 60 honey bee nest sites on 6 estates in Sussex and Kent to calculate long-term changes in colony density. He has surveyed over 1,000 ancient, veteran and other listed trees at an additional 10 sites to determine whether they represent important nest sites for wild colonies. He has also used waggle dance decoding of honey bee swarms to assess whether wild colonies are limited by nest sites in mixed urban-rural areas.
Scott F. Gilbert is a developmental biologist who has written textbooks in developmental biology and ecological developmental biology. Recently retired from Swarthmore College, where he taught and pursued research for 35 years. One of Scott's research foci concerns developmental symbiosis, the phenomena wherein symbiotic microbes, and host cells facilitate each other's development. He is also interested in the ways that another type of symbiosis, domestication, may be facilitated by developmental changes and bias further developmental changes. Scott has also been a Finland Distinguished Professor at the University of Helsinki and has participated in Vatican panels concerning embryology and religion. In 2016, he presented a lecture on developmental biology to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.
Scott brings over two decades of experience in nonprofit fundraising, having contributed to organizations such as the San Francisco Zen Center, Ceres Community Project, and, most recently, serving as the interim development director at Daily Acts. His journey in the art of Tea ceremony led him to the Urasenke Chado Gakkuen in Kyoto, Japan, where he obtained his teaching credentials. For fifteen years, he shared his expertise at the Urasenke Foundation in San Francisco and at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. Additionally, Scott received lay ordination in the Soto Zen tradition at San Francisco Zen Center.