Marigold Fenwick-Asantewaa

Direct year-round operations for ~2,400 commercial colonies across 46 North Dakota and Minnesota yards, producing 180,000+ lbs of clover and alfalfa honey annually Run migratory pollination program trucking 2,100 colonies to California almonds each February; negotiated contracts worth $1.1M+ per season at 98% colony-strength compliance Built a varroa mite IPM program (alcohol-wash sampling every 21 days, oxalic acid vaporization, drone-brood removal) that cut winter losses from 38% to 16% over 4 seasons Supervise a crew of 9 beekeepers and seasonal helpers; wrote safety SOPs for boom loaders, forklifts, and night moves with zero lost-time injuries since 2021 Oversee extraction and bottling line (2 Cowen uncappers, 60-frame extractors) under FSMA preventive controls; passed 3 straight state food-safety inspections with no findings Migrated hive records from paper to Apiary Book and HiveTracks, cutting inspection data-entry time 40% and enabling yard-level mite trend reporting

Managed a 900-colony division (splits, requeening, fall feeding), raising average yield from 62 to 81 lbs per colony Ran in-house queen rearing producing 650 mated queens per season, cutting purchased-queen spend by $28K annually Led loading and driving for 3 almond pollination trips per year (CDL Class A, 432 colonies per load) with on-time delivery

Inspected and maintained 30–40 colonies per day across a 1,500-colony operation during peak honey flow Pulled and extracted 4,000+ honey supers per season, helping hit a record 140,000-lb crop in 2015 Applied mite treatments and logged sugar-roll counts for 600 colonies, building the farm’s first IPM baseline

Senior research project on oxalic acid efficacy against Varroa destructor in northern overwintering colonies; member of the NDSU Pollinator Research Lab.