Bee Haven Honey Farm was a 50 year beekeeping operation in rural Vermont, started by Richard Drutchas in 1975, when he first sold honey in jars at the Rutland Farmer’s Market. By 2005, Bee Haven was a 700 hive operation providing bulk honey in five gallon buckets and many sizes of jarred honey to most of Vermont’s core coops, food specialty businesses and local home buyers. Bee Haven’s apiaries were located up and down the Champlain Islands to the north and along Lake Champlain from Shelburne Farms and further south on dairy farm land around Chittenden and Addison Counties. Bee Haven experienced a barn fire in Nov. of 2005. The same year the Bee Haven bees produced their largest honey crop ever, 60,000 pounds of honey, much of which was lost in the fire, along with a barn full of jarred honey cases, the honey extracting house and a large stash of beekeeping equipment. In 2010, after a few years of working to regain lost ground, BH sold many of its apiaries and all its retail accounts to a younger, still growing beekeeping operation, Northwood’s Apiaries, out of Troy, Vermont, to become a smaller-scaled operation focussed on making true raw honey. We incorporated many traditional natural products into our offerings, from hive medicines and garden grown natural body care products to infused vinegars, elixirs and beeswax candles. We sold our honey and natural products from our farm and at our local Capitol City Farmer’s Market in Montpelier as well as shipping our products within the U.S.

Bee Haven was Rick’s life creation. He hails from Detroit, Michigan, where, back in the day, he was a roadie for the MC5, ran a small trucking business hauling bulk food products to early coops across the upper midwest and performed in the Wayne State Children’s Theater. 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 for a while, before signing up for a round as a merchant marine. He ended up in the Canadian Maritimes and then made his way south to join up with Detroit friends in the Rutland, Vt. area in the early ‘70’s. It was in Vermont he first learned to keep bees, from an old time neighbor grateful for help. By the time Rick moved to Montpelier, he had his own hives in tow. He kept them on the roof of his apt. bldg. on Summer Street in Montpelier’s Meadow’s neighborhood. Rick served as the first full-time Vermont State Apiarist for almost a decade, inspecting hives with his beloved dog Max, trained to sniff out foul brood in hives. Honeybees and tending them, roaming the natural world, wild-crafting in the woods and playing in the sparkling fresh and salty waters have always been Rick’s brightest joys. He’s still out there playing in the wonders he loves.

Gen grew up in rural Minnesota in a community on tribal lands of the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands of the Dakota people along the Minnesota River in the times when family farms were being overtaken by Big Ag. 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 locations around the world. These contrasts in combination gave her a strong case of the how’s and why’s. She lived mostly in Mn. through college and graduate school years, studying Philosophy, Religious Studies and Psychology and working with children and adolescents impacted by trauma, sexual-violence and abuse in residential and wilderness treatment settings. She came to Vermont in the early 90’s and worked as a traveling family therapist before opening a group psychotherapy practice with a handful of other like-minded therapists in Hyde Park. In 2005, she began to work a bit with Rick and the bees, eventually letting her practice go to join up with them full time. She’s always shared the practices of a good hygienic bee ~ tending and fussing over the hive, spending time with the plants and flowers and worshipping the magic of nature while witnessing its tragic disappearance in our lifetimes at the hands of our human practices.

What mysterious forces guide our lives and what magic unfolds when we open up and lean into them. For this reason and many others we continue to dream of a world where humans have become more like honeybees ~ in love with our environment and living in deep care and relationship with it.

Many people have helped Bee Haven over the years; from friends and older generation beekeepers of the Champlain Islands, who passed their apiaries onto Rick when they were too old to keep on keeping, to old partners and local helpers. Many special folks have contributed in large and small ways to keeping the ball rolling at Bee Haven, from day to day labor to the hard pushes of extracting season. Special gratitude to all these folks. You know who you are, how hard it was and how meaningful.

The lands of Bee Haven and its hives are the unceded territory of the Western Abenaki ~ a group of Native American Algonquian-speaking peoples that are a 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 in the eighteenth century, 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 the waters themselves. 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 and when the integrity and magic of their natural ways are the driving forces of all we do and don’t do as human community.