Michigan State University has hired a new farm manager for its Pollinator Performance Center, a recently developed on-campus station dedicated to pollinator research, education and outreach.

Dan Wyns, who previously served as an academic specialist for honeybee colony health and management in the MSU Department of Entomology, will direct daily operations.

The center, which is located on the south side of campus off College Road, originates from a partnership among the Department of Entomology, MSU AgBioResearch and MSU Extension. It joins a cohort of several on-campus research facilities, as well as 15 off-campus facilities that MSU AgBioResearch supports through funding and operational assistance.

Since renovation began in 2021 on the former MSU farm building used for indoor animal air quality research, Wyns has been involved in the process of converting the space to accommodate honeybees and allow for meaningful pollinator-related experiments and teaching opportunities to occur.

His efforts included coordinating with contractors to identify building needs for a modern honey house and honey extraction facility, while simultaneously carrying out his duty to provide graduate students and industry partners with mentorship and expertise in beekeeping practices.

CENTER: The center, which is located on the south side of campus off College Road, originates from a partnership among the Department of Entomology, MSU AgBioResearch and MSU Extension. Pictured is the MSU Honey Extraction Facility. (Courtesy of MSU)

In addition to his academic role at MSU, Wyns also served as a field specialist for the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving honeybee health through data-driven research.

This work took him to more than 40 commercial honeybee enterprises across the U.S. to assist with field operations, inspecting honeybee colonies for disease, and imparting beekeepers with ways to evaluate and improve colony management practices.

Through his latest experiences, Wyns says he’s ready to collaborate with colleagues and partners to promote the center’s mission of advancing studies into honeybees and other pollinators. He says officially being a part of MSU’s campus farms will guarantee the proper capacity to care for honeybees, which in turn will safeguard them for novel research, instructional and outreach endeavors.

“I’m really pleased with the center’s transition toward becoming a university farm,” Wyns says. “It brings honeybees in line with other livestock. Honeybees are managed animals — they’re semi-domesticated. There’s a whole industry based around their care and management, and the beekeepers that look after them support many other agricultural producers by providing pollination services.”

Wyns’ first objective as farm manager is to ensure that the facility remains a safe and enjoyable place for faculty, staff and students to work. Eventually, he says he’d like to add more honeybee colonies to the farm and develop a potential breeding program, so researchers can have a larger pool of bees to work with.

“With the greater university mission, we want to support research and outreach activities that support our stakeholders,” Wyns says. “We have a nice facility where we can host field days and host groups of beekeepers for instructional activities using our on-site hives.”

Wyns graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in natural resource management and a graduate certificate in spatial data analysis.

Before joining MSU in 2017, he held several positions outside the U.S. as a beekeeper, apiary inspector, and operator at pollination service providers in New Zealand and Canada. He returned to the U.S. in 2014 as a faculty research assistant in the Department of Horticulture at Oregon State University, where he began his association with BIP.

In 2019, he launched and became co-owner of Beehavior Ranch, a small-scale beekeeping operation based in Williamston, Mich., that he and his wife still run today. Although he noted that taking care of honeybees as a business has different priorities from keeping them for research and educational purposes, he says there are similarities between the models that will help him in his new role.

“Having our own colonies to manage keeps us tapped into what’s actually happening on the ground, and it also gives us the ability to try different things and gain firsthand experience into what works and what doesn’t,” Wyns says. “It also helps motivate us to be well-read and up to speed on industry trends, so we can pair them with direct observations to support our colony management decisions.”

Source: MSUE