Our story begins with a boy growing up on a farm in Kansas. That boy, our beekeeper (D. J. Haverkamp), had a hackberry tree in the yard of his boyhood home. In that tree was a wild (feral) colony of honey bees. The colony remained there for many years and was always a source of both fascination and fear. That's where our interest in honey bees began.
D. J. moved to New York in the late 1980's to work for the Marriott Hotels. In the mid 90', he took a position working as an estate manager at an estate property in Bedford, NY. One of the neighbors to the estate was an elderly Norwegian couple who liked to play croquet and drink gin and tonics in their back yard on summer evenings.