It’s been an honor to have played a part in Vermont’s unique beekeeping history. For 35 years Bee Haven was a larger commercial apiary, making and selling up to 60,000 pounds of honey a year to Vermonters. Then 15 years as a smaller apiary focussing on true raw unfiltered honey and garden and woods-sourced natural body products and hive medicines. Lots of years of old school-style orchard pollination in the Champlain Islands and northern NY state and good memories of the Capitol City Farmer’s Market in Montpelier, Vt., as well. 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 wonderful and unexpected feather in our cap we’ll always relish. A hearty thanks to the Center for Honeybee Research in Asheville, N.C. for their annual international honey contest that celebrates the unique, beautiful flavors of raw honeys from around the world. Their work addresses the plight of honeybees and calls us on to do something about the damage our current human systems are doing to our precious one world and all its amazing inhabitants and ecosystems.

Bee Haven was Rick’s life creation. Hailing from Detroit, MI, he performed there 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 the day. He left Detroit 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 sizable working bee farm. A beekeeper forever, a sailor, diver and nature lover, he’ll be roaming woods and playing in waters as long as he can.

Gen grew up in a southwestern Minnesota when big Ag and globalization were first affecting its small towns and landscapes. From its territory along the Minnesota River, originally the tribal lands of the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands of the Dakota peoples, it was full of milkweeds, clovers, grasses, spring pasque flowers and prairie echinaceas. 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 in Mn., she ended up in Vermont working as a traveling family therapist, before opening a group psychotherapy practice with other like-minded's that’s still around today. An obsessive gardener, tender and sauna maven, she’s very much a hygienic bee herself who fusses over her hive, tends plants and gardens and wanders woods and boreal forests and treasures 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 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 value to uphold.