Spring celebrates new life. But for Vermont beekeepers such as Curtis Mraz, of Champlain Valley Apiaries in Middlebury, the annual season of rebirth is shadowed by death.
Each year starting around mid-April, the 31-year-old and his small team fan out to the company’s 30 bee yard locations, from just north of Rutland to the Canadian border, to assess how well their 1,000 hives have survived winter.
The beekeepers tie foil-wrapped bacon to the electric fences of each bee yard to zap the tender snouts of hungry post-hibernation bears, reminding them to steer clear of the reawakening bees. Then, as Mraz demonstrated recently in a Weybridge bee yard, he and his colleagues carefully remove the corrugated cardboard insulation, burlap sacks and coffee bean chaff that Champlain Valley Apiaries uses to make its honeybees as cozy as possible through cold weather.
“Bees need a lot more babying these days,” Mraz said.
Bears are a sporadic danger to the 39 hives on the old Weybridge dairy farm. Humans and their chemical inventions pose a much more persistent and existential threat to Champlain Valley Apiaries’ honey business, to all pollinating insects, and to the many crops and wild plants that depend on them for pollination.
In late 2022, Mraz became the fourth-generation president of Vermont’s oldest apiary business. It was founded in 1931 by his great-grandfather Charles Mraz, who was memorialized in a 1999 New York Times obituary as “an inventive beekeeper” and “leading evangelist for the therapeutic use of bee stings.”
Curtis stepped up somewhat reluctantly. For much of his lifetime, honeybees have been devastated by what was originally thought to be a mysterious, nationwide colony collapse disorder. Research has now linked the die-outs to the pervasive use of certain agricultural pesticides, which make the bees more susceptible to health threats such as mites and viruses.
In Vermont, beekeepers, some farmers and environmental groups helped push through a 2024 law to phase out the use of soy and grain seed treated with potent neonicotinoid insecticides by 2029. New York and Québec have passed similar laws. The battle is far from over, but it has given the Mraz family enough hope to build an ambitious new company headquarters in New Haven on an old dairy farm across from the Addison County Fair & Field Days site. They broke ground on the new honey house on April 11.
Stewarding Champlain Valley Apiaries through these challenging times has felt daunting, Curtis said. “What ultimately convinced me that I wanted to be involved long term is not that we just need to save the bees,” he said, “but that the bees are telling us that we need to save the rest of the bugs.”
The new law should help if the bees and beekeepers can hang in there for the next few years. Curtis said they lost hundreds of hives in 2025, which must be replaced with time-intensive breeding or costly new bees. “If I didn’t see any glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, it wouldn’t be worth building,” said Chas Mraz, 60, who preceded his nephew in running the company for almost 20 years. The pair are working together through a five-year ownership transition.
The family declined to share the business’ sales numbers. Over his tenure, Chas said, “I kept it in the black … but not very much in the black.”
Curtis explained that Champlain Valley Apiaries has two equally important revenue streams. One is honey, of course — mostly raw, unfiltered and unheated — from its own hives or sourced from other beekeepers. Annual production from Champlain Valley Apiaries bee yards varies, but for the past few years, Curtis said, it’s been about 60 to 70 55-gallon barrels. The honey sells to individual and retail customers around the country, starting at $7.50 for eight ounces. It is carefully blended to yield a consistently gentle wildflower sweetness and a creamy texture that doesn’t harden when it crystallizes, unlike most unheated honey.
Devoted customers swear by its health benefits, too. Wilder Wheelock recently popped into the Middlebury retail shop, which doubles as an office, to restock. “It’s local, it’s good, and I’ve been coming here since I was 13,” the 56-year-old Lincoln resident said. He makes an elixir with garlic, onions and honey for his family. “It seems to be the magic,” he said.
The bees are telling us that we need to save the rest of the bugs.
Curtis Mraz
Building on the legacy of founder Charles Mraz, Champlain Valley Apiaries’ second source of income is bee venom sales to pharmaceutical companies. They deploy it to treat bee-sting allergies and research other apitherapy applications, such as for knee osteoarthritis. “We are the only producer of injectable honeybee venom,” Curtis said. “That’s really what has kept us afloat as we’ve struggled with bee losses.”
In the Weybridge bee yard on April 14, Curtis moved among the hives equipped with just a pith helmet and a bee smoker, which he used to emit gentle puffs of smoke every so often to calm the bees.
The Mrazes rarely wear the customary white coverall bee suits with netted hats. “It’s not because we think we’re impenetrable or superhuman but because my grandfather always told me, ‘The bees are telling you things, and you need to listen,’” Curtis explained. “When you’re vulnerable,” you have to focus more intently on the bees and how you’re interacting with them, he continued. “You’re more in tune with what they’re saying.”
The hive he had unwrapped seemed fairly healthy, Curtis said, pointing out the yellow “pollen pants” on the legs of several bees. They were returning home with some of the year’s first food from budding maples and willows, carried as if in saddle bags.
Extracting a frame buzzing with bees from the hive, he gestured to honeycomb hexagons filled with golden brood. “Here are baby bees,” he said.
Beekeepers always expect some winter deaths, but over the past 20 years, Champlain Valley Apiaries has seen average annual losses of between 50 and 70 percent. “When my great-grandfather was running the business, he might lose 10 percent of his colonies in a bad year,” Curtis said. Back then, specific hives or colonies could last 10 to 15 years. Now, that lifespan is down to three.
“This time of year, we go out into the bee yard, and we are physically hauling boxes of dead bees and cleaning out thousands and thousands of pieces of equipment,” Curtis continued. “It’s a very emotional process, and it’s a lot of labor.”
“I’ve been down on my knees in the bee yard, just so depressed by what’s happening because of the chemical impacts,” his uncle echoed. “Even with the absolute best management practices, no matter how hard we were working, we would still get destroyed.”
The die-outs are largely attributed to the long-term effects of neonicotinoids, or neonics, a class of insecticides adopted widely in the early 2000s. Leslie Spencer, a University of Vermont PhD candidate studying wild pollinator conservation, explained that neonics are a neurotoxin designed to control crop pests such as seed corn maggots. But research shows “they also harm beneficial insects, like pollinators of all different kinds, managed and wild,” she said.
The toxins trickle down to birds, fish and other wildlife, Spencer noted. Even after their use is discontinued, no one knows how long they persist in the soil and water.
In the face of such ongoing adversity, Chas said he’s especially grateful to his nephew for stepping up. “It’s great to have the next generation in there, because they bring the future with them,” he said.
Curtis has introduced a management system that tracks individual hives using QR codes, and he invests time in social media and education with farmers, homeschoolers, college students and retirees. “This is how I see us moving the needle,” he said.
The young beekeeper sports a gingery beard and a tiny gold hoop in one ear — though “I have holes all over,” he joked. Curtis grew up on the New Hampshire seacoast but spent most summers in Middlebury with his dad’s family. After his father died when Curtis was 11, his uncle Chas and his grandparents Bill and Patricia took him under their wing.
It was a rite of passage for Curtis and many of his cousins to work at the honey house, labeling jars and folding boxes. They also helped out in the bee yards.
“It felt like a summer camp I didn’t want to be at,” Curtis recalled. “It was all bee stings and hard work.” The cousins joked that they should publish a calendar with family photographs of an extreme bee sting for each month.
While at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., studying biology and environmental policy, Curtis grudgingly joined the college beekeeping club, he recalled.
“Everybody was bee-curious but knew nothing,” he said. As he became the de facto instructor, he realized the value of the knowledge he’d inadvertently absorbed.
Curtis wasn’t quite ready yet to join the family business after graduating in 2018, he said. He worked as a livestock and vegetable farmer in New York’s Hudson Valley and in western Massachusetts and started his own beekeeping and farm management business during the pandemic for all the city escapees who “were buying 300 acres and wanting their Disneyland farm,” he said.
He also drove to Middlebury frequently to help his uncle triage bee die-outs. Not only were the weakened hives not making it through the winter, but beekeepers had also begun seeing serious losses in the fall, after corn grown from neonic-treated seed tasseled out.
Historically, honeybees have not foraged corn pollen, Curtis said, but agricultural land use has changed. “We don’t have as many big fields with flowers and cows grazing,” he said. “What we have is 300-acre fields of corn, and the bees go to whatever has available food.”
Of all the cousins, Curtis was the only one interested in taking over, and, after several years of running his own agricultural business, he decided it was time. He feels the weight of carrying the Mraz legacy at such a difficult time. “Ultimately, the responsibility outweighed that fear,” he said.
He also loves bees. “They’re my mentor, my livelihood, my therapy, my comedic relief and my gym,” Curtis listed. He described finding an entombed mouse during a spring hive check. The bees, he explained, had stung the invader to death and then effectively embalmed it to prevent decay using propolis, a resinous substance bees use to seal hives. “You find that, and you’re like, Wow, nature is heavy metal, man. That’s badass,” he said.
Curtis dreams of hosting a Vermont beekeeping museum in the massive, slate-roofed barn on the 101-acre New Haven farm that the family bought for $750,000 two years ago. It already hosts a small farm store in the old milk house, storage space and a woodshop. New construction will include a honey-processing facility, a larger store and room to host agritourism groups.
This summer, Champlain Valley Apiaries will bring artist Matt Willey of the Good of the Hive project to paint the old dairy farm silo in front of the barn. Willey has created murals all over the world in a quest to hand-paint 50,000 bees. That is the number of bees in a healthy hive, the kind Curtis Mraz hopes to keep tending for the next generation. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Speaking for the Bees | A fourth generation steps up as Middlebury’s Champlain Valley Apiaries nears its centennial”
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