Meet The Speakers

Karla Eisen is an experienced honey show judge and passionate supporter.  She currently serves as chair of the Eastern Apicultural Society (EAS) Honey Show Advisory Committee, was the VA EAS State director and 2018 program chair, and has served as a honey show secretary and judge for many years. Humbled by the expert craftsman/craftswomen who have guided her, she obtained certification as a Florida honey judge from the University of Florida in 2019 and is a certified judge by the American Honey Show Training Council (AHSTC).  Inspired early in her beekeeping endeavors by very wise beekeepers and embracing their ideas of a sustainable apiary, her beekeeping has focused on encouraging a sustainable bee club and beekeeping community whose members can produce enough nucleus colonies to supply bees instead of importing packages. Her local Virginia beekeeping club has not bought packages in well over a dozen years and maintains a nuc program. Karla has taught beekeeping as part of the Virginia Beekeeping Teachers Consortium for nearly 20 years, and with the help of her husband runs an increasingly smaller sideline apiary business in the remaining rural areas on the outskirts of Northern Virginia. Karla directed a USDA Sustainable Agriculture and Research grant as well as two Crop Specialty grant projects.  She is an EAS Master Beekeeper and has dabbled in the British (BBKA) master beekeeping program.

Hollee Freeman, PhD, is an award-winning and nationally certified educator who has worked for over three decades in K-12 schools, at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as in educational administration. Dr. Freeman has shared her work around creating space for learning in STEM contexts as a TEDxRVA and Creative Mornings RVA speaker, in addition to a host of other venues. Her academic work has been featured in books, podcasts and in articles focusing on educational reform, teaching practices, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Dr. Freeman is a self-published author of five children’s books, and, for the Boston Public Schools, she has written sixteen nonfiction readers as well as a compendium of curriculum for the 2024 Blacktastic services for Arts for Learning Maryland. Dr. Freeman has also developed customized curricula for businesses, schools, and educational organizations. Dr. Freeman has also made a film about beekeeping which has been accepted into two film festivals. Her children's books which focus on bees, beekeeping and nature provide a strong backdrop for her work with students and adults. Dr. Freeman is a Virginia certified apprentice beekeeper who uses her creative and professional endeavors to create space and cultivate learning experiences for adults and students locally, nationally and internationally. She is the Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences at Virginia Union University. Dr. Freeman is also the owner and operator of Freeman Educational & Business Consulting LLC, Hollee Freeman Photography, and the Hollee Freeman Foundation. Dr. Freeman curates learning experiences for students and adults through her program, City Bees RVA, an ecological and experience-based program focused on environmental sustainability and honeybees. Dr. Freeman was recently selected for the 2025 Outstanding Woman Award in the field of education by the YWCA. To find out more or to get in touch with Dr. Freeman, feel free to contact her here https://www.holleefreeman.com/ and has recently been awarded a spot in the CoGenerate Innovators Cohort for 2025-26.

Laural provides advice and instruction on plant health care, biologically intensive integrated pest management, applied soil ecology, and tree health and safety. Builders, homeowner organizations, property management firms, counties, cities, state agencies, landscape architects, landscape designers, and homeowners are among her clientele. In order to deliver high-quality, practical information for action plans, reports, workshops, and trainings, her work necessitates field assessments that include in-person client meetings on the job site, hands-on plant-soil interaction, and comprehensive analysis in the field, office, and laboratory. Her company’s main goal is to provide ecological information services. Work deliverables demonstrate a rigorous adaptive strategy that aligns field realities with client needs through an ecological “whole house” approach that considers both little details and broad scientific concepts.

Amanda Sweeney is the founder and “Keeper of the Bees” at Edgewood Apiaries, a bee-keeping and sustainable agriculture enterprise located between Richmond and Charlottesville, Virginia. At Edgewood, Amanda manages around 100 bee colonies — with a special focus on producing raw, locally sourced tulip-poplar honey — combining her family’s deep Virginia farming roots with a commitment to ethical, transparent food production. Before returning to agriculture, Amanda spent over two decades working in supply chain, technology, and marketing with major companies such as Nike and Petco Animal Supplies. That corporate background gave her a strong foundation in operations and business strategy — a skill set she now uses to run Edgewood with a market-driven yet values-centered approach. In addition to her role at Edgewood, Amanda actively supports the regional food and farming community as a board member of Root to Table, where she serves on the Resource Development Team. In that capacity she helps foster connections among chefs, artisans, farmers, and consumers to advance sustainable, local agriculture. Amanda’s personal journey — from growing up on a small family farm in Powhatan, Virginia; to working years in corporate supply-chain and marketing; to rediscovering her roots in bee-keeping and sustainable farming — reflects a broader mission to bring locally crafted, honest food to her community while honoring Virginia’s agricultural heritage.

Keith Tignor has worked closely with the beekeeping industry over the past 35 years. Since 2000 he has served as the State Apiarist in the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. In this capacity he is the coordinator of the regulatory and assistance programs for beekeeping in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Mr. Tignor serves in leadership and advisory positions in local, state, and national beekeeping organizations, provides presentations on honey bee management and participates in classes and workshops on honey bee related programs. Initiatives begun at VDACS include training and promotion of queen and nucleus colony production, developing and implementing beneficial management techniques, overseeing the Beehive Distribution Program and developing pollinator protection plans. His duties at VDACS also include coordinating conservation efforts for endangered and threatened plants and insects and managing the export of ginseng from the Commonwealth.

Dan is retired and resides in rural Selma, Iowa with his wife Diana. He enjoys spending time outdoors tending his garden and bees. Dan has learned not to complicate the beekeeping experience. Keep it simple and let bees do what bees do best with little human interference. He has converted from using the popular Langstroth beehive system to raising bees in low-maintenance, easy to build Layen horizontal hives. Dan has studied the natural beekeeping concepts of Dr. Leo Sharashkin and Fedor Lazutin where the beekeeper’s primary tasks are limited to providing bees with an ideal habitat and harvesting surplus honey once per year. Some of the highlights of this approach include providing bee-friendly horizontal hives with deep Layen frames, capturing local bee swarms and refraining from the treatment for disease and mites to strengthen the resilience of the bees.