We’re a small beekeeping and gardening operation, selling our honey and other products from our farm and shipping our non-honey products within the U.S. We’re located on the east bank of the North Branch of the Winooski river, in Putnamville, Vermont, just south of Worcester village and ten minutes north of our wonderful little state capitol of Montpelier. We maintain a home apiary and a handful of other apiaries tucked in on dirt road farming operations between our place and Lake Champlain. We follow the European Union's Regulations for Organic Beekeeping, though we don’t believe organic honey is actually possible in most of the world anymore. We raise our own queen bees with our own most gentle and productive hives, occasionally adding genetics from bees we admire into our lines. We make our own nucleus cells to repopulate the now routine winter hive losses we experience but we don’t currently sell them. We use true organic practices in our gardens, though we’re not officially certified or seeking to be. When we take a honey crop, we stock our shop first with plenty of half-gallon/6 pound glass jars. If there’s honey left once we’ve done this, we fill one and two gallon bulk buckets and offer them to our mailing list customers at drive-through honey sales at our farm exclusively for them. If any buckets remain after these sales, they head to the shop for anyone to purchase. You can always see what we have available by taking a look at our Products page.

If you’re the very interested type, you can read on below for a much deeper dive into Bee Haven’s story.

Rick Drutchas started Bee Haven Honey Farm about 45 years ago. Strangely, that number stopped changing a few years ago. He hails from Detroit, Michigan, where he was a roadie for the MC5, ran a trucking business hauling bulk food products to early coops and performed in Children’s Theater before leaving not long after the riots. He and a friend biked the west coast north to south, spending time in Cali before signing up for a round with the merchant marines. He ended up in the Canadian Maritimes and eventually made his way south from there to join up with Detroit friends living together in the Rutland, Vt. area. It was here he first learned to keep bees from an old time neighbor. When he moved up to Montpelier, he brought his hives with him, keeping them on the roof of his apt. bldg. in the Meadow’s neighborhood. He went on to serve 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. This ‘real job’ helped him purchase the old Norton farm in Putnamville, where he could focus on building up his own beekeeping operation. In a few years, Bee Haven grew to over 700 hives and retail accounts at core coops and food specialty stores across Vermont. Honeybees and tending them, roaming the natural world, wild-crafting in the woods and playing in the waters, have always been Rick’s greatest joys. When he’s not working, he’s still out there playing.

Genevieve Drutchas grew up in rural Minnesota and worked with children and adolescents impacted by trauma, violence and abuse in residential and wilderness treatment settings there before moving to Vermont in the early 90’s. She worked here first as a traveling family therapist doing home-based work with rural families before opening a group psychotherapy practice, Green River Guild, in Hyde Park, with a handful of other like-minded therapists. It’s still thriving today and led by a new generation of therapists. She joined up with Rick and the bees in 2005. A lover of a good read, a long talk, a good swimming hole and an early bedtime, her pleasures are much like those of a hygienic bee ~ flowers, plants, hearth-tending, seeking, being in the garden and nesting.

Bees and their hives, and honey, represent something special, not just to us, but to many humans, who seem to have always honored and revered them. Besides providing us with a natural source of sweet, that’s literally made at the crossroads of the sun, the land, it’s plants and flowers and the waters that nurture them, hives are perhaps the most preeminent symbol of sustainability, co-existence and harmony with the natural world. Today, more than the honey they provide or the older ways they remind us of, bees represent how to live in an honorable and right-minded way on our planet and within its natural cycles. Bees take pleasure in and pollinate the very life of the lands they live on. They help nurture all the nature around them. It’s what they do. We like to dream of a world where humans have become more like honeybees ~ in love with their environment, living in deep care of it and relishing in its divinity and beauty.

Many people have helped Bee Haven get started and get through over the years; from the original beekeepers who gave their apiaries on the Champlain Islands to Rick to manage when they were letting go, to former partners, friends and helpers who’ve kept the ball rolling through the pushes. Special gratitude to all these folks.

The land we’re on is the territory of the Western Abenaki ~ a group of Native American Algonquian-speaking peoples. It was a part of Wabanahkik, (wah-bah-NAH-keek) "the land of the dawn", a larger territory that included areas of Quebec, the Canadian Maritimes, New Hampshire and upstate New York. The Abenaki people became part of the Wabanaki Confederacy in the eighteenth century, involving Abenaki, Passamaquoddy, Malecite, and Micmac communities. We acknowledge the original Native people’s sovereignty and the sovereignty of the land itself here.