50 years of honest labor, sweet adventure and many stings. 35 years as a larger commercial operation making and delivering bulk and jarred honey to Vermont’s core food specialty stores and coops. With apiaries located up and down the Champlain Islands and spread through Hinesburg’s back road dairy farms and on into Vergennes and Charlotte, as well as the home farm apiary in Worcester. And for the last 15 years, as a smaller-scaled apiary focussing on old world-style, true raw honey, beeswax, hive medicines and garden-grown, herbal natural care products sold at Montpelier’s award-winning farmer’s market, from our farm and shipped nationally.

Bee Haven was Rick’s magical life creation. Hailing 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 hauling bulk foods for early food coops. He left soon after the riots there to bike the west coast north to south. After cooking and diving for abalone in California, he left as a merchant marine and washed ashore awhile later in the Canadian Maritimes. From there he headed south to join up with Detroit friends in the Rutland, Vt. area in the early ‘70’s. It was in Vermont that he first learned to keep bees from an old time neighbor. He ended up with them on the roof of his Summer St. apt. in Montpelier’s Meadow’s neighborhood. Rick went on to serve as the first full-time Vermont State Apiarist for almost a decade, inspecting hives with his dog Max, who had been trained to sniff out foul brood in hives. He eventually moved onto the old Norton dairy farm in Worcester, where he created a working bee farm in the old dairy farming buildings. Rick loves roaming woods and playing in the waters wherever he is.

Gen grew up in a small, rural Minnesota towns, when family farms were first being overtaken by big Ag, in the territory along the Minnesota River in the southwest, the 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 locations. Seeing different worlds as she grew up resulted in a strong case of the how’s and why’s. She went on to study Philosophy, Religious Studies and Psychology and to work with children and adolescents impacted by trauma, violence and abuse in residential and wilderness treatment settings. Once she got to Vermont, she worked as a traveling family therapist before opening a group psychotherapy practice with other like-minded's that’s still around today, while she gardened and worked on an old farmhouse up a dirt road in Worcester. In 2005, she began working with Rick and the bees a bit and after a few years she joined up with them full time. Very much a hygienic bee, she loves to fuss over the hive, tend things and spend time nurturing plants.