Michele Colopy, President/ Treasurer, and co-founder has been focused on honey bees, beekeeping, and pollinator education for more than seven years. Her father was a beekeeper in southeast Ohio for their small apple orchard. She keeps honey bees in the city, and has replaced her crabgrass front yard with pesticide-free pollinator flowers for her honey bees and native pollinators. She was the Program Director for the Pollinator Stewardship Council from 2013 to 2019.
Ms. Colopy holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management/Arts Administration. Her nonprofit experience includes work in the performing arts, housing and homelessness, foreclosure prevention, community development, and health and wellness. She volunteered as Treasurer of The Ohio State Beekeepers Association (OSBA) from 2016-2019 modernizing the accounting, co-managing a USDA grant, administering the Affiliate program, and managing two grant programs of OSBA.
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Terry Lieberman-Smith, Secretary, and Co-Founder has been actively involved with bees, beekeeping, and local beekeeping associations for over 15 years. She has held a variety of leadership positions in both the local and state level beekeeping associations. At The Ohio State Beekeepers Association, Inc., she was Newsletter Editor for 8 years, Conference Coordinator for 7 years, Vice-President for 4 years, and President for 2 years.
Terry understands the importance of clean pollinator habitat and enrolled part of her property in CRP to ensure that not only the bees in her apiary, but all pollinators in the area have a haven for forage. Terry holds an undergraduate degree in business, along with an MBA specializing in Logistics. She incorporates her business background, leadership skills, and interest in sustainable beekeeping practices to help strengthen the beekeeping community and develop partnerships with other like-minded groups.
Charlotte Ekker Wiggins, Vice President, served as Missouri State Beekeeping Association’s secretary, then partnership liaison, from 2012 to 2022. She is a certified master beekeeper and master gardener, now working with the Great Plains Master Beekeeping program out of University of Nebraska at Lincoln to offer Midwest beekeepers best management practices. She has been teaching beginning beekeeping for more than a decade, has been a beekeeper herself since 2010 and followed sustainable gardening practices on her one-acre hillside garden since 1982.
Charlotte has a M.A. in management from Webster University, St. Louis, and has established a number of educational non-profits including a bee club and humane society.
She is a member of the Missouri Master Pollinator Steward Steering Committee and co-author of the University of Missouri’s Extension program designed to raise awareness of the plight of pollinators. She also serves on the Missourians for Monarchs Collaborative, a group of 40+ agencies working to increase pollinator habitat.
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Wendy Mather, Board member has been a beekeeper since 2007. She owned and operated Hardscrabble Honey, a modest sideline operation in central Ontario which averaged 1000 kgs of clean wildflower honey each year, and worked as the Honey Bee Health tech representative for NOD Apiary Products in Canada and the US. She achieved her Journey Level Beekeeper certification from the University of Montana in 2015. As a social service worker (SSW) and adult educator, she taught community development, program design and portfolio development at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario, and enjoys sharing her passion for bees, education, environmental stewardship and program design.
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