Trip to VT

Beautiful VT country side

Just an animal skin on the front porch

The places I have gone, and the people I have met while keeping bees has been the best part of this hobby. An awesome example of this was a trip that I took with my beekeeping partner Jack and our friend Ryan this past spring. 

A friend of Jack's family owns a farm in northern Vermont on which his son has started a wooden ware company, and now a rather large apiary. Their farm is about one square mile, and it is impressive. When you first pull in, it feels a bit like you are entering another world. A long ascending hill cutting through a dense forest. When you approach the farm, it is clear that this is a working farm. There were quite a few head of cattle fenced in, and what was rather striking was the large flat stretch of land with wind socks everywhere. Right in the middle of the farm there is an airport.

Lots of cattle

The owner of the farm is named Bob, he works as a big wig executive at a large financial institution in Manhattan. I guess he got tried of driving up to his retreat in VT from the city, so he bought himself a small plane and built an airport. Pretty cool if you ask me.

When we arrived we passed two large plane-hanger sized buildings, and we approached the house at the very top of the hill. Bob's son (affectionately called Guido) came cruising over in a pick up truck to give us the tour. Bob and Guido first showed us a hanger full of lumber. Since Bob purchased the farm they have been harvesting wood from all over their property and milling into usable pieces of lumber. The plan, as I understand it, is to eventually build a post and beam home with all the hard wood lumber they have in there. We are talking two feet by two feet beams that are probably 50 feet long. It was extraordinary.

Bob and Jack in the workshop

We then went to the next hanger where the wood shop is located. In this shop there must have been over $100,000 worth of wood working equipment. Along with the equipment there were parts of beehives everywhere. Pallets of unassembled boxes and frames. All of which are made with pine trees that were fell, and cut into lumber right there on the property. I felt a little bit like I was in heaven. I could have stayed there for days making boxes and experimenting with some ideas I have about feeders and landing boards.

Our tour continued with a quad ride around the property and a short hike to a scenic view. It was a beautiful cool spring afternoon. There is nothing like drinking a beer with a view like this.Yes, that is a bucket of beer with us.

Surveying the land

Oh yea! There was a donkey too

The whole trip felt kind of surreal. After our quad trip we grilled up some burgers made from meat butchered from their cows. A burger flipped with a small hatchet might have been the best tasting burger I have ever

"Guido" making the greatest burgers

had.

We left late in the afternoon with a trunk full of unassembled boxes and a promise for a return trip to help them out when they get bees. 

Later in the spring, Billy, the son of Bob who is running this operation purchased over a hundred nucleus hives from a beekeeper in Florida. He flew down there and drove a truck full of bees back to CT. Jack is going to return to the farm this weekend to help him do full inspections on all of the hives he installed. Which I think is around 80! When this family does something, they go big. I wish I could join them, however my wife is due any day now and leaving for any period of time would be a sketchy choice.

Uncle Dave SWINKIN! Also the collie patrol.

Another awesome part of the trip was a stop at Jack's uncle Dave's house in upstate New York. It was only about 30 minutes from the farm in VT, so we headed over there to spend the night. He was a great host, we ate dinner and sacked out until our drive home the next day. Dave is always an entertaining character, and you can count on him for having a great story to tell. We stayed up talking about bees and the renovations Dave wants to make on the house.

One thing to add about the stop at Dave's chateau was Ryan's ridiculous level of snoring. I posted a video because it was so extreme. If we had bees with us they would have swarmed to avoid his snoring.I don't know how his wife Lisa deals. I slept on the couch.

We had a fun productive trip and met some crazy survival guys up there in Vermont who I chose to keep out of the blog for fear of them finding out I posted their pictures or names on an official place like the internet. They were pretty serious, they had lots of camouflage clothing and chewing tobacco. Also the boxes we got were great for the nuc hives we bought from Gilman this spring. Things have really come together for the apiary.

Anyone looking at this blog and are interesting in purchasing any of this fine Vermont grown wooden ware, please message me and I can easily get you in contact with these guys.