Arboreal Apiculture Salon

For our 50th Salon, we celebrate the Wild Honey Bee Atlas, Apis Arborea's global, participatory platform for discovering, registering, and monitoring wild and free-living honey bee colonies over the long term. The Atlas is the world's first fully transparent, open-data monitoring platform for wild honey bees. It empowers individuals and communities across the globe to observe and follow nests together, with every record visible to all custodians.

Few people combine backgrounds in computational mathematics, farming, publishing, and beekeeping quite like Ivan.

Father of a large family and a graduate of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Lomonosov Moscow State University, he has devoted the past decade to the study of honey bees, their biology, and the promotion of apiology throughout Russia.
 
Ivan is the founder of the Association for Natural Beekeeping in Russia and a passionate science communicator, delivering lectures on bees to audiences ranging from university students to business leaders. Through the Association, he and his colleagues are leading initiatives to conserve Russia's dark forest bee populations and to study free-living honey bee colonies in the forests of central Russia.
 
He has also introduced Russian readers to the work of Thomas Seeley through his translations of several of Seeley's books, with additional publishing projects currently underway.
   
Please join us for a conversation that reaches across borders into the wild and free-living honey bees of the Russian forest.

Five Years of Listening: What the Bees at Galbreath Are Teaching Us
In this podcast we are delighted share the results of five years of ecological monitoring at Galbreath Wildlands Preserve, one of the most sustained observations of honeybee colonies living as part of a wild landscape anywhere in the US.
Michael Thiele, founder of Apis Arborea, is joined by Dr. Benjamin Rutschmann, visiting from Germany, to walk us through what this long-term work has revealed. Among the findings: colony lifespans and survival rates that challenge prevailing assumptions about what honeybees are capable of when they live on their own terms, as well as insights into natural colony densities. We explore what the free-living population at Galbreath is teaching us about the resilience of the wild, and how these colonies serve as a compass point for innovative models of apiculture that draw on biomimicry and integrate evolutionary processes.
About Dr. Benjamin Rutschmann
Benjamin Rutschmann is a honeybee researcher and ecologist whose work centers on wild-living colonies, their nesting sites, and the forage resources that sustain them. He received his PhD from the University of Würzburg in 2022. Together with Patrick Kohl, he published the first systematic survey of wild-living honeybee colonies in Europe, confirming that self-sustaining populations still exist in Central European forests. He has since studied colony life histories and survival across Germany, Spain, and Switzerland, and has contributed to research projects spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. Most recently, he co-authored a framework for assessing wild Apis mellifera populations that helped inform their classification as an Endangered taxon on the IUCN Red List in the EU.
About Michael Thiele
Michael Thiele is the founder and Executive Director of Apis Arborea, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring wild, free-living honeybee populations and their ecological relationships. His work integrates field research, habitat restoration, and education to support resilient pollinator communities, with a focus on biomimicry, low-density systems, and evolutionary processes. Michael's approach bridges science and the humanities, exploring how humans can participate more responsibly within living systems. He is currently leading Apis Arborea's 7-year field study on wild honeybee populations at Galbreath Wildlands Preserve, which will be the focus of this Salon. Michael is also a co-founder of the Arboreal Apiculture Salon.

A major development has recently emerged in pollinator conservation. Wild honeybees in parts of Europe have now been classified as Endangered on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. What does this designation mean for honeybees, ecosystems, and the future of pollination? In this Arboreal Apiculture Salon, we explore the scientific, ecological, and conservation implications of this landmark recognition. The conversation examines the status of free-living honeybee populations in Europe, the drivers behind their decline, and how this moment may reshape the way honeybees are understood within conservation science and agricultural systems.  
We are honored to welcome two distinguished voices for this discussion: • Steve Rogenstein, co-founder of Honey Bee Watch, a global coalition tasked with better understanding the factors that bolster free-living honey bees' survival, • Arrigo Moro, researcher at the Italian National Reference Center for Beekeeping and Honey Bee Health, and co-founder of Honey Bee Watch.  
Together we reflect on what this moment signals for wild honeybee conservation and explore emerging approaches that support resilient, free-living pollinator populations within living landscapes.

It was an honor to welcome Constanza Prieto Figelist, Latin American Legal Director at the Earth Law Center, and Dr. Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, a leading voice in the global movement to protect wild pollinators and the Amazon, as our guests for Salon #46. They share their advocacy for the recognition of the rights of stingless bees in the Amazon and the broader legal frameworks emerging to protect them.