Meet The Founder

One woman's journey from crisis to calling, guided by the healing wisdom of the hive.

Greetings, I'm Netta!

I'm a beekeeper and apitherapist-in-training based in Colorado. The Apiarian Home is my creation, a space for products and services inspired by, and made with help from, the beloved honeybee. Everything I make is designed to bring a little more healing energy and beauty into your everyday life through their magic and medicine.

How the Bees Found Me

In 2018, I needed a major surgery that drastically disrupted my hormones. The aftermath was rough. My digestive system was a complete mess and I started breaking out from lower half of my face down to my chest. I was desperate for relief.

I can't tell you exactly why I turned to the hive. A calling, maybe, or just intuition. But I started researching and found a company selling a mixture of honey, propolis, royal jelly, and bee pollen. The reviews were full of people claiming it had changed their skin, their gut health, and so many other benefits. On a hunch, I immediately ordered a jar.

I started slathering it on my skin and eating it by the spoonful. After some time, my skin cleared up and my digestion drastically improved. I was stunned! Shooketh! If the bees could do this for my skin and gut, what else were they capable of healing?

That question changed everything. I started experimenting with hive-based remedies and learning about the medicinal properties of each product the bees create. The more I learned, the more fascinated I became.

"I figured, if I was going to be using the medicines from the hive at this scale, I should really get to know and understand the maker, our beautiful honeybee."

Falling in Love with Beekeeping

A few years later, a beekeeper friend, Morgen Harrington, helped me set up the first hive on my property. Morgen runs the Bee Bee Hive Collective, where she helps people install and manage hives in their own yards. I was one of her first clients, and I was nervous. I'd read about bees, studied their medicine, but I'd never actually worked with a live colony.

Morgen was instrumental in helping me feel comfortable around the bees. I learned from her by watching her inspections and noting her findings. This helped me understand what to look for, and how to read their behavior in order to anticipate their needs. Through her work and my own research, I discovered that beekeeping should be focused on observing, supporting, and learning to work alongside the bee for their greater good. I'm certainly still learning as beekeeping is a lifelong practice, but I got my footing in understanding the hive as a living, breathing, conscious superorganism.

I am in love with the rhythm of tending to a hive. The way they organize themselves with such efficiency and grace. The way a healthy hive hums with purpose. The way they teach you, if you're willing to pay attention, about cooperation, resilience, and working in service to something larger than yourself.

I keep one to two hives at any given time in my backyard. They're my teachers, my collaborators, and the heart of everything I create.

The Bees as Healers, Again

Fast forward to early 2025. I'd just celebrated a milestone birthday, and I was ready to live my best, most unapologetic life. But the Universe had other plans. The stress I carried from work that wasn't aligned with who I was started to show up in my body in alarming ways.

I developed a large alopecia spot on the top of my head. Thankfully, my usual hairstyle covered it, but there were other, more worrying symptoms. A rash spread across my upper eyelids and one side of my face. I could feel my body shutting down, my essence draining away. Something had to change.

I increased my bee medicine supplementation (honey, propolis, pollen), but I could tell that my body needed something stronger. I found a local bee venom therapist, Alex DeCesaro from Alma Apiary, and scheduled my first session. We talked about the power of bee venom, its ability to modulate the immune system and reduce inflammation. Then we began. She carefully administered a few stings along my back meridian, and with each one, we paused to thank the bee for her sacrifice.

That gratitude practice became essential to my healing. After the session, I took the bees home and held a small ritual in my yard. I thanked them again for their medicine, for the gift of their venom, and buried them among the flowers they'd spent their lives visiting. It felt important to honor what they'd given me.

This practice of gratitude is woven into everything I do with hive medicine now. Before I eat a spoonful of honey, I pause and picture the bees. To produce just one pound of honey, bees must visit approximately two million flowers and fly more than 55,000 miles. Isn't that incredible? A single, sweet foraging bee visits 50 to 100 flowers in one trip and produces only about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime.  Honey is made through extraordinary effort, and it deserves to be honored.

Within weeks of trying bee venom therapy, I felt invigorated, like myself again. Only more aligned, more certain of what I was meant to do.

The Leap

I took a leap of faith and quit my day job. I look at the state of the world and can't help but think there is incredibly important work to be done in sync with bees, the land, the Earth, the Universe. I want to be part of that more than ever.

I enrolled in an certification program through Diggin' Livin Farms, which will certify me as an apitherapist. Soon, I will offer consultations and educational resources that honor the profound medicine that comes from working alongside these magnificent beings.

The Apiarian Home

I hope you enjoy my collection of bee-inspired products! Each one is crafted around a role in the hive, infused with beeswax and botanicals that honor the partnership between flower and bee. These home fragrances are my way of bringing the luxurious scents of nature into your home.

Thank you for trusting me with this work. Thank you for caring about the bees. And thank you for being part of a community that values healing, reverence, and the wisdom of the natural world.

Bee Well,

Netta

Read my note from the founder here.