PAm Board of Directors
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Pat Heitkam
Project Apis m. Board Chairman Pat Heitkam has been keeping bees since he took a colony for payment at his bike shop. That was 35 years ago, and he is now a major queen breeder in Northern California, a honey producer and a commercial pollinator. He owns Heitkam’s Honey Bees in Orland, California, with his son Russell. He has served the beekeeping industry on the Board and also as President of several organizations over the years, including the American Beekeeping Federation, the California State Beekeepers Association, and the California Bee Breeders Association. He is currently Vice President of Bee Informed Partnership, Inc. and is a cooperator with honey bee breeding and research projects, and also projects to develop honey bee forage throughout the USA. |
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Gordon Wardell
Dr. Gordon Wardell, is the Director of Pollination Operations, Wonderful Orchards, and President of the South Valley Bee Club. Gordon has been a professional apiculturist for over 30 years and has woked with bees on three continents. Previously he was the extension apiculturist for the State of Maryland and he owned and directed S.A.F.E. Research and Development in Tucson, Arizona, a company dedicated to developing products for the bee industry. Gordon’s accomplishments include Mega-Bee, the honey bee nutritional supplement and years of research in the area of Varroa mite control, honey bee nutrition, fire ant monitoring, small hive beetle, Africanized Honey Bees, and many other topics. In addition, he has authored numerous scientific publications on honey bees. |
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John Miller
John Miller is Past-President of the California State Beekeepers Association (CSBA). John is a fourth-generation beekeeper. He has kept bees for over 40 years. John owns Miller’s Honey Farms, Inc. based in Blackfoot, ID with branches in Gackle, ND and Newcastle, CA. He also owns Miller Honey Mandarins of Newcastle, CA where he grows seedless Owari-Satsuma Mandarins. John is a partner in En-R-G Foods, Inc. of Steamboat Springs, CO, manufacturers of honey-based energy bars, gels, protein bars and energy chews. John is a former 2-term chair of the National Honey Board. As the subject of The Beekeeper’s Lament by Hannah Nordhaus, John epitomizes the American migratory beekeeper and ‘how one man and a half a billion honey bees help feed’ a nation. John is married to Professor Jan H. Miller, Microbiology, American River College. They have four children and 10 grandchildren. |
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Zac Browning
Zac Browning is a fourth-Generation Commercial Beekeeper from Jamestown, North Dakota. Zac currently serves the beekeeping industry in several capacities as a former President and a current Legislative Advisor of the American Beekeeping Federation, a NAPPC Steering Committee Member, A Steering Committee Member of the Honey Bee Health Coalition, a director for the Pollinator Stewardship Council. With his focus on honey bee forage and habitat issues for many years, he co-founded PAm's Bee and Butterfly Habitat Fund, and has been working to build alliances among stakeholders interested in establishing honey bee habitat. |
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David Mendes
David Mendes, now retired, operated 20,000+ hives for crop pollination and honey production. With a home base in Ft Myers, Florida, he brought bees to Maine for blueberry pollination and Massachusetts for cranberry pollination each summer and to California for almond pollination in the winter. In the Spring and Fall the bees make honey in Florida. Dave has been a full time commercial beekeeper since 1977. He is past president of the American Beekeeping Federation. |
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Doug Hauke
Doug Hauke manages the Hauke Honey Corporation, a 3,000 colony operation which produces and packages honey at its FDA/USDA-inspected facility in Marshfield, Wisconsin, and he also produces nucs and queens in East Texas. Doug serves on the Board of the American Honey Producers Association (AHPA) and had the opportunity to work several seasons at the Madison Bee Lab under Dr. Eric Erickson and E.R. Harp. Doug earned degrees in bacteriology and virology from the University of Wisconsin. |
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Brent Barkman
Brent Barkman is a third generation beekeeper and honey packer and has been a part of the industry all his adult life. He oversees the operations of two separate bee operations that own 16000 colonies of bees producing and pollinating in eight states. Artesian Honey Producers has 8500 colonies based in South Dakota, wintering in Oklahoma and Texas and pollinating in California. Barkman Apiaries is based in Florida and operates bees in Michigan and New York as well as pollination in California. Barkman Honey is the family owned business that packages honey based out of Kansas supplying millions of pounds of quality honey to consumers all over the world. In addition to serving as the vice chairman of Project Apis, has served the industry in many capacities including serving as chairman of the National Honey Board, once while it was a producer board and again more recently after it was changed to a packer board. He is also a member of multiple state beekeeper organizations and both the American Honey Producers Association and American Beekeeping Federation. His memberships also include the National Honey Packers and Dealers Association and the Western States Packers and Dealers Association. He was one of the founders of True Source Honey and is a proponent of high quality traceable honey for the enjoyment of the consumer. |
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Gary Shilling
Dr. Gary Shilling is President of A. Gary Shilling & Co., Inc., economic consultants and publisher of INSIGHT, a monthly report of economic forecasts and investment strategy. He is also an Investment Adviser Representative. He has been a Forbes magazine columnist since 1983. He is a columnist for Bloomberg View and is on Investment Advisor magazine’s panel of investment strategists. He appears frequently on radio and television. He graduated from Amherst College with an AB in Physics, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, and earned his MA and PhD in economics at Stanford University. He served on the staffs of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Bank of America. Before establishing his own firm in 1978, Dr. Shilling was Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of White, Weld & Co. Earlier he set up the Economics Department at Merrill Lynch, at age 29, and served as the firm’s first chief economist. Prior to Merrill Lynch, he was with Standard Oil Co. in NJ (now ExxonMobil). He has been an avid beekeeper since 1990 and lives in Short Hills, New Jersey. |
