Bee Haven Honey Farm made honey in Vermont for 50 years this year (2025). For 35 years, Bee Haven was a larger commercial operation that delivered bulk and jarred honey to many of Vermonts core food specialty stores and coops, with apiaries north to south on the Champlain Islands and down through Vergennes, Charlotte and Hinesburg dairy farm territory as well as at the home Worcester/Putnamville farm. For the last 15 years, Bee Haven was a smaller-scaled apiary that focussed on making old world-style, true raw honey, beeswax candles, hive medicines and garden-grown, herbal natural care products sold only from our farm and local Farmer’s Market, Montpelier’s own Capital City Farmer’s Market and shipped within the U.S.

Bee Haven was Rick’s life creation. He hailed from Detroit, MI, where he performed with the Wayne State Children’s Theater, was a roadie for the MC5 and ran a small trucking business that hauled bulk food products for early food coops. He left Detroit not long after the riots and biked the west coast of the U.S. from north to south, ending up in California where he cooked for a while and dove for abalone. He signed up for a stint as a merchant marine, which got him to the Canadian Maritimes. From there, he eventually made his way south to join Detroit friends in the Rutland, Vt. area in the early ‘70’s. It was in Vt. he first learned to keep bees, from an old time neighbor grateful for the help. Rick moved onto Montpelier, with his hives in tow. He kept them on the roof of his Summer Street apt. in Montpelier’s Meadow’s neighborhood, where the bees gathered nectar from the beautiful early spring flowering trees that are still beloved in that neighborhood today. He went on to serve as the first full-time Vermont State Apiarist for almost a decade, inspecting hives with his dog Max, who was trained to sniff out foulbrood in hives. Rick loves Vermont. He’s sailed the waters of Lake Champlain in two boats that second hand made their way to him from other sailors. He’s roamed and foraged so many woods here and generally gotten in as much of the kind of play that makes his heart sing, whenever he wasn’t working, which was most of the time. Here’s to new explorations in boreal forests and sparkly waters in the years to come.

Gen grew up in rural Minnesota in the times when family farms were being overtaken by the ascension of big Ag in the territory along the Minnesota River in southwest Mn, the former tribal lands of the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands of the Dakota people and where her paternal immigrant relatives settled to make their way and where her maternal relatives spent their playtime, further north in the boreal forest areas. Her father’s love of travel meant she and her siblings spent some of their childhoods wearing dog tags in case they got lost in far away locations around the world. It was a combination that resulted in a strong case of the how’s and why’s for her. She went on to study Philosophy, Religious Studies and Psychology, work with children and adolescents impacted by trauma, sexual-violence and abuse in residential and wilderness treatment settings, being a traveling family therapist here and opening a group psychotherapy practice with other like-minded therapists that’s still around today with a new clan of younger therapists at the helm. In 2005, she began to work with Rick and the bees a bit and after a few years with a lot of family caretaking travels, she eventually let her practice go completely to join up with Rick and Bee Haven full time. Her loves are akin to a hygienic bee ~ tending and fussing over the hive, spending time with plants and in flowers, and she also loves seeking wild and clear water swimming holes, and tending wholey places, inside and out.

Bee Haven was on 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 were a part of the Wabanaki Confederacy, which involved Passamaquoddy, Malecite, and Micmac communities, as well. We recognize the original native people’s sovereignty and superior stewardship of these lands, as well as the sovereignty of the land and waters themselves. They lived in them for over 10,000 years without causing the harm and desecration it took our contemporary western culture just about 100 years to cause. 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 and when their continuance is the driving force of all we do and don’t do as humans.