​WELCOMING

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• ​Opening the Field​
  The conference's organizing team welcomes everybody to this special gathering in a spectacular setting. Alex Tuchman, Cheyanna Bone, and Steve Rogenstein orient us to the place, land, and envisioned intentions of the fourth iteration of Learning from the Bees, with the intention of beginning our shared time together with presence and purpose, and to set the tone for the days ahead.

 

• ​Jonathan Powell

At the Hive Entrance

Each Learning from the Bees has opened with conference co-founder Jonathan Powell. Jonathan holds a unique vantage point, weaving together insights and themes from previous gatherings to ensure our conversations build upon one another, with each conference a waypoint in our deepening journey with bees.

Learning from the Bees extends beyond understanding honeybee biology or behavior. Rather, it invites us to discover what we might learn about ourselves—individually and collectively—when we enter into genuine relationship with these remarkable creatures. 

In a world saturated with digital communications, attention-seeking “unsocial” media, and relentless human activity, can we still hear the bees? The bees have not changed, but to those who pause and listen, they can offer a rare gift: nonhuman wisdom and an enduring inspirational message of hope that speaks across species and time.

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KEYNOTE ADDRESSES

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• ​Marcus Briggs-Cloud
  Our Indigenous Resurgence of Holistic, Ecologically Regenerative Lifeways​
  Since time immemorial, Maskoke People inhabited what is commonly and colonially known as Alabama and Georgia, until they were forcibly removed in 1836. This talk relays the story of Ekvn-Yefolecv (ee-gun yee-full-lee-juh) Maskoke Ecovillage, a small climate-positive, income-sharing community of Maskoke People who, in January 2018, returned to the homelands with unwavering commitment to holistic, ecologically regenerative lifeways through the revitalization of Maskoke language and culture, regenerative agriculture, natural building construction, ecological restoration, endangered species conservation, and restorative economics. 
  
  Marcus explores how the story of Ekvn-Yefolecv and the integral connection between culture, language, and landscape can help other humans relearn how to engage more deeply with the natural world and create a genuine relationship of reciprocity.

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• ​Johannes Wirz
  Toward a New Way of Beekeeping​
  Beekeeping is not a craft, but art and science. In his seminal bee lectures, Rudolf Steiner pointed out that the hive is permeated by love, and thus, beekeepers should learn to observe it with their soul, i.e., by the way of the heart. 
  
  A first step to achieving this is phenomenological. We learn to understand the process of swarming as a fundamental means for health and resilience. We pay attention to our feelings when we observe the swarm exit and its congregation on a tree. We admire the dynamics of natural comb construction and open our heart for the beauty and fragility of snow-white wax. We are impressed by the effects of local queen mating and by the growth of the young colony. But there is more. Beyond health, we experience trust, harmony, love, respect, and unbiased sharing within the hive. 
  
  Finally, we deepen Steiner’s words about the colony as a sister being of humans and as an archetype of social communities in the future. This presentation opens up a new eye for bees, inviting us to connect the heart with the hive and to aspire to walk the inner path for an understanding of the mission of the “BeeBeing.”

 

 

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

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• ​Living Landscapes: Belonging, Restoring, Healing
  Within the living presence of the Blue Ridge Mountains, this panel explores the interwoven themes of regenerative land stewardship, ecological belonging, and our evolving relationship with place. Through stories rooted in practice, four speakers share pathways into deeper connection: rewilding buffalo on tribal lands, restoring habitat to protect pollinators, tending bees without owning land, and expanding our lens to see the full ecology of a hive. Together, their insights invite us to consider what it truly means to participate in the healing of Earth, guided by the wisdom of the land and those who care for it.
  
  Moderated by Alex Tuchman
  Featuring Marcus Briggs-Cloud, Laura Rost, Michael Joshin Thiele

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• ​Voices of Wisdom: Speaking through the Feminine from the Heart of the Earth
  This panel of women gathers to share what lives most deeply in their hearts: messages rooted in the present and attuned to the future. This session opens space for true wisdom to emerge through presence, intuition, and attunement to the Earth as a living being. The conversation may touch on bees, interrelationship, grief, guidance, and deeper energies shaping these times. You are invited into a field of listening, where the feminine voice carries seeds of insight and possibility for what wishes to be born now.
  
  Moderated by Cheyanna Bone
  Featuring Melanie Kirby, Rebecca Robertson, plus others (tba)

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• ​Learning from the Bees: Observing Mysterious Phenomena
  Bees invite us into an encounter with the unknown, where observation becomes reverence and mystery deepens our capacity to listen. This panel explores what becomes possible when we slow down and let go of the need to analyze, identify, or categorize. Through lived experiences and stories from the edge of knowing, panelists share surprising and often unseen phenomena that have emerged through years of careful observation and attunement. We will consider what it means to trust inner impressions as much as outer signs, and how cultivating presence with the bees can reveal entirely new dimensions of their being.
  
  Featuring Alex Tuchman, Johannes Wirz, plus others (tba)

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• ​Are We Ready to Swarm? Integrating the Collective Experience
  As the conference draws to a close, this facilitated session offers a shared space to reflect, integrate, and carry forward what has been stirred over the past three days. Guided by Jonathan Powell, we will weave together themes, insights, and inspirations from across the conference, gathering the nectar of our collective experience and preparing to carry it back into our communities, our work, and our lives.
  
  Moderated by Jonathan Powell
  Panelists will be announced onsite​

 

 

PARALLEL BREAKOUT SESSIONS

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• ​Cheyanna Bone
  Awakening the Senses: An Experiential Approach to Cultivating Awareness & Interspecies Communication

Modern life often shelters us from direct relationship with nature, buffering us from the living world and the subtle information it offers. Bees, as highly attuned and sensitive beings, live in continuous relationship with their environment. Working and learning with them provides a powerful opportunity to discover how to perceive, listen, and participate in the relationships that shape natural systems.

Join us for an experiential session where you will be invited to explore your senses and the information arising from your body as an avenue to cultivating awareness and connection. The body tells the truth and reads the field. Through guided practices and embodied exploration, we will work with practical techniques that support deeper perception, refine how we approach bees, and strengthen our relationship with the natural world. Participants will develop skills to enhance observation, presence, and their capacity for interspecies communication.

Drawing on years of somatic embodiment practice, nature-based skills, and lived experience in relationship with bees, Cheyanna offers grounded, accessible tools that participants can carry forward.

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• Melanie Kirby
  Indigenous Insights into Apiculture: Integrating Interconnected Knowledge Systems to Support Regenerative Bee Stewardship
  We can only know where we should go when we know where we come from. Reflecting on ancestral philosophies and practices, we can begin to remember—and to reconnect with—what it means to be a part of a whole, and how this whole supports life through interconnected memories of time, place, and purpose.
  
  This session is filled with sensory and creative exercises that invite you to delve into the layered and mosaic kaleidoscope of existence, what it means to bear witness, and to also engage in a dynamic natural world of unfolding stories across landscapes and cultures. From conceptualization to methodologies and practice, we will discuss Consilience (Unity of Knowledge) and have an opportunity to share our experiences with each other, recognizing a shared worldview of interconnectedness. As conduits in the present, we are stewards connecting the past to the future. Understanding the 7R's of Indigenous Research can help illuminate how to serve as a conduit with reverence for the past and conscientious aspirations for future-forward pollinator conservation. 
  
  Join Melanie (aka the Nectar Nomad) as she shares three decades of contemporary beekeeping reflections, woven with ancestral insights from her mixed heritage as a bee breeder, field researcher, seed saver, extension educator, and storyteller.

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• ​Rebecca Robertson
  Mayan Stingless Honeybees: The Culture, Ceremonies & Medicine of the Melipona of Mexico
  Explore the living Indigenous culture of the Maya people from the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. For more than 3,000 years, they have been in sacred relationship with their native honeybees, the Melipona, locally known as X’unan Ka’ab. They also rely on Melipona honey as a medicine to heal wounds, eye diseases, and gastrointestinal issues. We will learn how the Maya honor this tropical stingless bee, looking at the culture, history, and ceremonies of the beekeepers.
  
  In addition, we will practice humming together to energetically connect to these sacred stingless bees. A “Honey in the Eyes” ritual for stimulating the pineal gland will be thoroughly explained. This is a practice that often brings deep IN-sight and healing, and aspects of it will be shared in the spirit of Indigenous traditions of this continent. (Note: This ceremony is shared with respect and in acknowledgement that it may differ from those led by Indigenous elders.)
  
  Come experience the healing gifts of the sacred Melipona bee.

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• ​Laura Rost
  Bee City USA: Mobilizing Communities to Protect Pollinators
  Pollinators are in decline, but the good news is that there are plenty of ways for communities to help, no matter their size or budget. Join Laura for a presentation and discussion of how to mobilize your community to protect native pollinators through pesticide reduction, events, and outreach. Whether or not your community is interested in becoming a Bee City USA, this session will provide plenty of resources, inspiration, and practical advice based on the work of more than 470 Bee City USA and Bee Campus USA (BCUSA) affiliates in 48 states (plus DC and Puerto Rico), and the research and expertise of staff at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
  
  The Xerces Society is an international nonprofit that protects the natural world through the conservation of invertebrates and their habitats. As an initiative of Xerces, BCUSA unites people to make their communities better for pollinators—in particular native bees—by adding high-quality habitat and reducing pesticides.

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• ​Michael Joshin Thiele
  Honeybees in the Trees: Learning from Wild Nest Ecology
  This breakout session explores the natural tree-nesting ecology of honeybees and the insights these wild systems offer for contemporary conservation, apiculture, and land stewardship, while touching on its Indigenous and cultural history. Honeybees have a long evolutionary history as arboreal companions within forests and woodlands. These wild ecologies support longevity and form an important foundation of honeybee resilience. What might we learn by observing the conditions under which honeybees thrive in the wild?
  
  Drawing on Apis Arborea’s long-term field research with free-living honeybees, alongside our TreeNest habitat program, we will explore key characteristics of natural nest environments and the ecological principles they reflect. The session introduces biomimicry and animal rights as guiding lenses for understanding honeybee habitat and examines how these insights can inform broader conversations about conservation, biodynamics, apiculture, and regenerative land stewardship.
  
  Participants will be introduced to structural features of natural tree cavities, practical blueprints for building natural nests, ecological conditions that support resilient colonies, and the concept of wilding as the expression of self-willed ecological processes.

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• ​Alex Tuchman
  Biodynamic Beekeeping: In Dialogue with the Hive
  At the center of Spikenard’s approach to beekeeping are two living questions: Who are you? and What do you need? These questions, asked sincerely of the honeybee, form the ground from which our practices emerge, as evolving methods and gestures of care, listening, and reciprocity.
  
  This breakout session, offered on location at Spikenard, is an experiential introduction to biodynamic beekeeping, rooted in relationship. Participants will explore foundational principles, learn time-tested methods that support hive vitality, and engage in direct, meditative observation of the bees, opening a space where practical knowledge and intuitive perception meet. We seek to co-create understanding with the bees, allowing them to show us how to serve their health, their wisdom, and their role within the greater web of life.

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• ​Luke Wallace
  Songwriting, Earth, and Justice: Finding Your Voice in the Movement
  Join Canadian musician Luke Wallace for a songwriting session, where participants will be prompted into a mix of lyric-writing, melody exploration, and group-singing that is perfect for folks looking for a creative spark. The session will allow for both individual creative time and writing in groups, where we will gather our ideas into a single, cohesive song-speaking. Rooted in themes of love, solidarity, and ecological awareness, this breakout will leave you feeling connected to yourself and to your community. 

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• ​Johannes Wirz
  Going Treatment-Free
  Since the arrival of the Varroa mite, beekeepers have been on the warpath. In the last 45 years, the number of treatments to fight this destructive mite have climaxed and, soon, their efficacy will come to an end. Thus, we must find other solutions, such as learning how to go treatment-free. In many places in Europe, friends have shown that this method works.
  
  All colonies, irrespective of the subspecies, exhibit behaviors to cope with the Varroa mite to a more or lesser extent. All of these are easy to observe and monitor, and will be described in detail. Additionally, a procedure of action towards treatment-free beekeeping will be outlined. It includes observations of pertinent behaviors, strategies to prevent colony death, how to create collaborative groups of regional treatment-free beekeepers, and how to help each other out with colonies and, if needed, queens from successful colonies. This session will provide basic skills to discover candidates in your apiary that can potentially cope with Varroa, and will help pave the way for treatment-free projects across the United States.

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SPECIAL EVENTS

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• Enter the Hive

​An immersive installation that places attendees inside a human-sized “hive” invites you to perceive the bees' world through our five senses, experience voiceless communication, and participate in the bees' collective social activity as a fully functioning superorganism.​​​

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• Speed BEE Talks
  Inspired by TED Talks, conference attendees will be invited to apply for 5-minute slots onstage to share their bee-related projects and observations in and around the hive. Preference will be given to young researchers and individuals from underrepresented groups and geographies. Applications will open in Spring 2026.

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• Tom Seeley Tribute
  As the “father” of wild honeybee research, Tom Seeley’s career as a biologist at Cornell University in upstate New York, has had an immeasurable influence on generations of honeybee scientists, beekeeping practitioners, and the bee-curious from around the world. From his six seminal books to hundreds of scientific papers and scores of live onstage presentations, his 40-plus years of contributions to the field have been invaluable.
  
  The Learning from the Bees community wishes to acknowledge this lifetime of achievement with a video tribute to the man himself, a compilation of heartfelt stories from invitees directly affected by his inquisitive mind, groundbreaking research, and generous accessibility throughout the years. Stay tuned as to how you, too, can contribute words of gratitude to Tom. 

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• Saturday Evening Music & Dancing
  A concert experience on Saturday night encourages mixing-and-mingling and connecting in true Appalachia style, with live music by Luke Wallace as well as local artists from the Handmade Music School. An optional outdoor Appalachian BBQ to accompany Saturday evening’s festivities can be purchased when buying your ticket (or up to 60 days before the event).​

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• Cross-Talk Pollination
  Attendees get the opportunity to converse with speakers and one another, when convening in intimate groups for informal “pop-up” conversations staggered throughout the venue. Here is your chance to dive deeper into a topic or catch snippets of what you may have missed during a parallel breakout session that you did not attend.​​​​​

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* Program subject to change.