We’re a small beekeeping and gardening operation that sells our honey and other natural care products from our farm and we ship our non-honey body 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 about fifteen 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 farm 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 really possible in our world anymore. We raise our own queen bees from our most gentle and productive hives, occasionally adding genetics from other bees we admire. We make our own nucleus cells to repopulate the now routine winter hive losses northern beekeepers 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 first stock our shop with plenty of half-gallon/6 pound glass jars of our award-winning raw honey. If there’s honey left over from the crop after jars are filled, we fill one and two gallon buckets, and occasionally five gallon buckets if the crop’s been large enough, for our mailing list customers to come to one of our drive-up honey sales at the farm. If any bulk buckets remain following these sales, they head to the home shop for anyone to purchase and you’ll see them on the Products page when this happens. (You can always see what’s currently available, with details and pricing, on the Products page of this site.) 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 50 years ago this ‘25 year. 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 the Wayne State Children’s Theater, before leaving not long after the riots to bike the west coast of the U.S. north to south, ending up in California for awhile and eventually signing up for a round with the merchant marines. He ended up in the Canadian Maritimes before making his way south to join up with Detroit friends living together in the Rutland, Vt. area. It was here, in Vermont, where he first learned to keep bees, from an old time neighbor grateful for some help with his hives. By the time Rick moved to Montpelier he brought his hives with him, keeping them on the roof of his apt. bldg. on Summer Street in the sweet 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, who was trained to sniff out foul brood in hives for their inspections together. This ‘real job’ helped him purchase the old Norton dairy farm in Putnamville, where he was able to focus on building up his own beekeeping operation. Bee Haven eventually grew to over 700 hives and retail accounts for bulk and jarred honey 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 are Rick’s joy. When he’s not working, he’s still out there playing in the wonders.

Gen grew up in rural Minnesota and then lived in Mpls./St. Paul for a stint for college and graduate school and some years working with children and adolescents impacted by trauma, sexual-violence and abuse in residential and wilderness treatment settings before heading to Vermont. She worked in Vt. as a traveling family therapist doing home-based work before opening a group psychotherapy practice, Green River Guild, in Hyde Park, Vermont, with a handful of other like-minded therapists for some years in private practice psychotherapy work. In 2005, she began to work a bit with Rick and the bees, eventually letting her psychotherapy practice and license go in 2010 to join up full time with Bee Haven. A lover of a good read, a long talk and chewing over complexities, she shares the loves and practices of a good hygienic bee ~ tending, nurturing and fussing over the hive, plants and flowers and worshipping the magic of nature.

Bees, their hives, and the honey they make, represent something special; not just for us, but for many humans, who seem to have always honored and revered them. It’s especially sad that our dominant culture has made it impossible for honeybees and other pollinators to thrive and even survive, after they’ve played a central role in our earth’s eco-systems. Some people don’t want to acknowledge the impacts our dominant culture has brought to this earth, even as a 6th extinction takes place. All the profound beauty, wonder and complexity that’s developed over eons. It’s not hard to see what’s created this kind of blindness if you look around, but as beekeepers you see it from the front line. Honeybees themselves have become an expected seasonal casualty these days. It’s more lucrative now for beekeepers to make bees to sell to other beekeepers to replace the ones routinely lost each year, along with sending your living hives on cross country trips to pollinate mono-crops like almonds, blueberries, squash and more. There are no real boundaries anymore in the honeybee world, to limit disease, viruses and other pathogens and parasites from spreading readily around the world. And yet bees are still out there working as hard as they can to make their hives as safe and strong as they can be, while still providing us with a natural source of sweet, that’s literally made at the crossroads of the sun and our earth’s elements, working in combination to make their sweetest, most fragrant expressions ~ flowers that the bees sip nectar from. We like to dream of a world where humans have become more like honeybees ~ in love with our environment and living in deep care of it, while relishing and contributing to its beauty, but that’s not something we’re witnessing or even coming to terms with yet. A heartbreaking reality.

Many people have helped Bee Haven over the years; from the original beekeepers on the Champlain Islands who passed their apiaries onto Rick, to former partners, friends and helpers who’ve kept the ball rolling, from the day to day labor to the hard pushes of extracting season for over 45 years. Special gratitude to all these folks.

The land we’re on is the unceded 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 including 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 recognize the original Native people’s sovereignty and superior stewardship of these lands, along with the sovereignty of the land itself. We pray for, vote for and act for a future on earth when the sovereignty of the land is recognized by all its peoples and is the driving force of all we do and don’t do.