It’s been an honor to have played a part in Vermont’s unique beekeeping history. For 35 years as a large commercial apiary, making and selling up to 60,000 pounds of honey a year to Vermonters, from health food stores and coops like City Market and Hunger Mt. Coop, to Vermont speciality stores, Cold Hollow and Dakin Farm. Then a much smaller, scaling down apiary for another 15 years, focussing on true raw unfiltered honey and garden and woods-sourced natural care products and hive medicines we sold from our farm and at the Montpelier Farmer’s Market. Lots of years of early morning and late night memories of spring orchard pollination in the Champlain Islands and northern NY state, and a whole lotta set up and breaking down memories of vending over the years. We shipped our honey and natural care products nationwide and occasionally out of the country. Becoming the proud winners of the International Black Jar Honey Contest’s Grand Prize for the Best Tasting Honey in the World in 2022 was a dreamy feather in our cap. Hearty thanks to the Center for Honeybee Research in Asheville, N.C. for their annual international raw honey tasting contest, celebrating the unique and beautiful flavors of true raw honeys from around the world. Their work addressing the plight of honeybees calls us on to do something more significant and real about the damage our current human systems are doing to our one precious world and all its amazing inhabitants and ecosystems.

Bee Haven has been 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 after the riots to bike the west coast from north to south. After doing some cooking and diving in California, he sailed away as a merchant marine to wash ashore in the Canadian Maritimes for a spell, before heading south to Detroit friends in the Rutland, Vt. area in the early ‘70’s. It was there 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 beloved fur buddy Max, who was trained to sniff out foul brood in hives. He eventually purchased the old Norton dairy farm in Putnamville/Worcester, giving him the room he needed to create a real working bee farm. A beekeeper forever, a sailor, diver and nature lover, he’ll be roaming woods and playing in waters for as long as he can.

Gen grew up in a southwestern Minnesota when big Ag and corporate globalization first began affecting its small towns and landscapes. From the territory along the Minnesota River, originally tribal lands of the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands of the Dakota peoples, she remembers the fragrance of milkweeds, sweet clovers, prairie grasses, tender pasque flowers, bright but shy gentians and rangy prairie echinaceas from walks with a friend of her Mother’s in early childhood that sparked a love affair with plants and growing, wild places and sparkly waters. 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, she worked with children and adolescents impacted by trauma, violence and abuse in residential and wilderness treatment settings in Mn before ending up in Vermont as a traveling family therapist and opening a group psychotherapy practice with other like-minded's, that’s still around today. Very much a hygienic bee herself, she likes fussing over the hive and tending and adoring plants. Her favorite days are spent wandering in the woods, bogs and boreal forests, sweating in saunas and cooling off in wild swimming spots.

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 of this land and their superior stewardship of it, 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 for humans to uphold.