It’s been an honor to have played a part in Vermont’s unique beekeeping history. Becoming the proud winners of the International Black Jar Honey Contest’s Grand Prize for the Best Tasting Honey in the World in 2022? A delight. 50 years of commercial apiary labor and honey making, a decade and some of hive inspections, 35 years with as many as 700 hives, many years of old school orchard pollination in the Champlain Islands and northern NY state and finally 15 years of running a much smaller-scale apiary focussed on making old world, true raw honey and hive medicines alongside garden-sourced natural care products sold from our farm and the Capitol City Farmer’s Market in Montpelier, Vt., and shipped nationwide.

Hearty thanks to the Center for Honeybee Research in Asheville, N.C. Their annual international honey contest celebrates the unique, beautiful flavors of raw honeys from around the world, while their work addresses the plight of honeybees and calls us on to increase our understanding of the impact our current world has had on them. Bees and other pollinators are truly the canaries in the coal mine and our powers that be are still not changing their ways. What a strange species we are.

Bee Haven was Rick’s life creation. Hailing from Detroit, MI, he performed with the Wayne State Children’s Theater, was a roadie for the MC5 and ran a small trucking business hauling bulk foods for early food coops back in those days. He left Detroit soon after the riots and biked the west coast north to south. After some time cooking and diving for abalone in California, he left as a merchant marine and washed ashore in the Canadian Maritimes for a spell, before heading south to join Detroit friends in the Rutland, Vt. area in the early ‘70’s, where he first learned to keep bees from an old time neighbor. He ended up with those bees on the roof of his Summer St. apt. in Montpelier’s Meadow’s neighborhood before he went on to serve as the first full-time Vermont State Apiarist for almost a decade, inspecting hives with his dog Max, trained to sniff out foul brood in them. He eventually moved into the old Norton dairy farm in Worcester, giving him the space and room he needed to create a real working bee farm. A beekeeper forever, a sailor, diver and nature lover, he’ll roam the woods, play in the waters and taste honeys as long as he can.

Gen grew up in a southwestern Minnesota when big Ag and globalization were first beginning to affect small towns and landscapes across rural America. The territory she’s from is along the Minnesota River, originally tribal lands of the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands of the Dakota peoples. Her father’s love of travel meant she and her siblings spent some of their childhood wearing dog tags in case they got lost in far away places. Seeing a lot of different worlds when she was young left her with a strong case of the how’s and why’s. Going on to study Philosophy, Religious Studies and Psychology and working with children and adolescents impacted by trauma, violence and abuse in residential and wilderness treatment settings, she also worked as a traveling family therapist in Vermont, before opening a group psychotherapy practice with other like-minded's that’s still around today. An obsessive gardener, tender and sauna maven, she lived in an old farmhouse up a dirt road in Worcester before meeting Rick in 2005 and eventually joined he and the bees full time. Very much a hygienic bee herself, you can find her fussing over her hive, tending plants and gardens and wandering woods and boreal forests and seeking sparkly waters. Called to feel the seasons and to worship at wild and wholey wells, she considers herself lucky she found herself deep in the bee world for a time in her life.

Bee Haven Honey Farm sits on a bit of the unceded territory of the Western Abenaki ~ a group of Native American Algonquian-speaking peoples part of the larger Wabanahkik, (wah-bah-NAH-keek), the Peoples of the Land of the Dawn. A territory that includes areas of Quebec, the Canadian Maritimes, New Hampshire and upstate New York. The Abenaki people are a part of the Wabanaki Confederacy, which involved Passamaquoddy, Malecite, and Micmac communities. We recognize the original native people’s sovereignty and their superior stewardship of these lands, as well as the sovereignty of the land and waters themselves. The Wabanahkik lived on these lands of the Dawn for over 10,000 years without causing the harm and desecration our contemporary culture created in under 100 years.

We pray for, vote for and act for a future on earth when the sovereignty of the land and waters is recognized by all peoples as the most important value to uphold.