More About Our Speakers

Bob Binnie is a commercial beekeeper and honey packer located in the southern Appalachian Mountains of northeast Georgia and for over thirty years has been doing business under the name of Blue Ridge Honey Company in Lakemont, Georgia. Bob initially became involved with migratory commercial beekeeping in Oregon in 1981 and due to operating as both a pollinator and honey producer has managed bees in nine states. Voted 2003 Beekeeper of The Year in Georgia, Bob has also been President of the Georgia Beekeepers Association, the Northeast Georgia Beekeepers Association and the Macon County Beekeepers Association in Franklin, North Carolina.

  Randy McCaffrey has 32 years as a contractor and structural claims specialist. In 2010 at the age of forty he assisted his brother in the removal of a honey bee colony from an old furniture warehouse. This experience began his development of a fascination with honey bees. In 2010 armed with his knowledge of construction and his new found fascination with bees he began removing and relocating feral bee colonies from commercial and residential structures along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. As of January of 2023, the number of cut outs (hive removals/relocations) he has done total nearly one thousand and swarm catches total approximately five hundred.

Randy typically keeps forty to fifty colonies of his own but regularly works alongside large commercial beekeeping operations purely for the enjoyment and education to be gained. His family, including himself, his father and his brother, keep approximately two hundred and fifty colonies total. Much of his work with bee removals includes mite load and disease resistance studies in feral or otherwise chemically untreated honey bee colonies. He video records much of his work which he shares through social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok to help educate, entertain, and inspire current and future generations of beekeepers. His work can be found on most large social media platforms under the channel name 628DirtRooster with the tagline “Where Hobby Beekeeping Is a Way Of Life”.

Randy along with his wife Elizabeth are continuing to grow their beekeeping and mentoring business. They recently added a subsidiary named Coastal Grove Bee Works which will focus on mentoring beekeepers, honey sales and a lady’s beekeeping apparel line.

Earl Hoffman is a second generation beekeeper.  With over 35 years of experience with the honey bees.  Earl along with his wife, Carol Hoffman, are both EAS master beekeepers since 2001.
Together Earl and Carol manage a 40 acre farm in Michigan where they raise queens and do local organic vegetable pollination.  As Sideliner beekeepers they moved most of their hives to west Tennessee in 2022.  Earl and Carol taught beekeeping classes while in Michigan for over nine years.  Earl is a public speaker and gives educational lectures on honey bees and beekeeping across the country.  Earl and Carol are owners of Essential Honey Bees LLC, a company that has been collaborating with scientists since 2014.  They are currently working with the Milwaukee Wisconsin Company, Strong Microbials Inc.  

Currently Earl is an author of several educational articles published in Bee Culture Magazine, editor Jerry Hayes.

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). 

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.

Dr. Liz Walsh is a Research Scientist with the USDA-ARS laboratory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Liz is currently working on various projects which include examining: aggression vs irritation 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). 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 well into her "old teenager" 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 research initiatives.

Jeff is happily married to his beautiful wife Roxanne, together they have 6 kids (3 boys & 3 girls). 

Jeff & Roxanne together founded and organized the Bee Alive Conference & Expo.  

His beekeeping journey started in 2017 with 1 nucleus hive. That same year after finding out removing honeybees from homes & businesses was a way to generate income and acquire free bees, The Bee Commander was started. Jeff owned and operated a very successful remodeling business for over 20 years, the knowledge gained from remodeling allowed him to understand where honeybees would be able to build a hive in various areas in structures and allowing them to be removed safely & correctly. To date he has removed over 500 honeybee colonies and currently owns/manages 150-200 colonies. 

Along with removals every year, Jeff has become a reputable VSH queen breeder. He grafts & sells quality, Harbo Assay tested VSH queens that have the highest VSH traits. Raising queens for VSH excellence has become the main obsession & passion of his, with Instrumental Insemination being next on his radar. 

Jeff is also working with the USDA in Baton Rouge, La on their VSH breeding program and hopes to be a big part of spreading knowledge of this trait worldwide. 

He is currently enrolled in the UF/IFAS Master Beekeeper Program under Jamie Ellis. He is also on schedule to take the EAS Master Beekeeper test in 2024, allowing him to have a broader platform to share his obsession with others... HONEYBEES! 

Seth Hill sideline beekeeper hailing from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Operating a small 200 colony bee operation migrating from north to south Ga every winter. His career in beekeeping starting working at Blue Ridge Honey Company.

Susan Cobey founded the New World Carniolan Program, now in its 40th generation. Her work is focused on enhancement of honey bee stocks and improvement of colony health through selective breeding. To diversity the U.S. gene pool, this includes the WSU project to collect and incorporate honey bee germplasm from their native European range into U.S breeding populations. She provides training, instructional material and information in presentations, publications, worldwide to promote honey bee health.

Her experience includes working with the bee team at Washington State University and management of Honey Bee Research Laboratories at the Ohio University State and the University of California, Davis. She has also worked with the USDA Honey Bee Lab., Baton Rouge. Her background includes working in commercial queen production in FL. and CA., and founding and operating a queen production business, Vaca Valley Apiaries, in California. Currently she runs Honey bee Insemination Service, LLC. 

Born in Colombia, South America, Juliana obtained a B.S. in Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution in 2004 from the University of California, San Diego. In 2010 she obtained a Ph. D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. She was an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow from 2010 to 2013 at North Carolina State University. In January 2013, Juliana became Assistant Professor of Apiculture in the Department of Entomology at Texas A&M University (TAMU) in College Station, TX.  She was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in 2018 and Professor in 2023. Her research program focuses on the biological and environmental factors that affect the reproductive quality of honey bees, the behavioral ecology and population genetics of feral honey bee colonies, and the quality and diversity of honey bee nutrition in a changing landscape. She is an active member of the Texas Beekeepers Association and has been invited to speak at dozens of scientific conferences and beekeeping association meetings across the USA and internationally. She teaches the courses Honey Bee Biology, Introduction to Beekeeping, and Professional Grant and Contract Writing. Since 2014 she has been the coach of TAMU’s undergraduate and graduate teams of the Entomology Games at the branch and national games of the Entomological Society of America (ESA), earning first and second place nationally four years in a row. She is the 2023-2024 President of ESA’s Southwestern Branch and is the past elected chair of the National ESA’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She previously served as the elected chair of her department’s Faculty Advisory Committee and has been part of several committees at the departmental, college, and university levels. Most recently, she received the 2023 Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching from the Southwestern Branch of the ESA. In 2021 she received the James I. Hambleton Memorial Award, which was established by the Eastern Apicultural Society of North America to recognize research excellence in apiculture. She also received the 2020 John G. Thomas Award for Meritorious Service from the Texas Beekeepers Association for her contributions to the apiculture industry in the state. She received the 2019 Dean’s award for Excellence in Diversity and the 2016 Dean’s award for Excellence in Early Career Research from TAMU’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. She also received the 2018 Outstanding Achievement in Mentoring award from the Entomology Graduate Student Association. She was 2014 President and 2013 Vice-President of the American Association of Professional Apiculturists.