About Us

Top Sun Farm was officially created in 2021. Here's how it happened...

Henry has always had a desire to start beekeeping. He approached Dana who's response was, "Bees?! You want to have Bees? Are you crazy?" He left it alone for a while until one day when we were introduced to creamed honey. We were up in Maine visiting friends when we had this delicious treat. Dana had never tasted anything like it. Henry knew this was his chance. He said, "See, if we have bees, we can make this ourselves." Well, that was it... Dana was convinced. We stopped at the local beekeeping store there and spoke with the owner. We went home and started ordering our equipment and bees; we joined a beekeeping association and enrolled in Bee School. 

We started off with 3 hives and quickly added 2 more. We had an amazing mentor who supported and encouraged our excitement for beekeeping. Going into our first winter, we had 6 hives and sadly lost 3 of them. Mistakes were made, but we learned a lot that year. The following year, our apiary quickly grew to 20 and we've been growing ever since. We are currently up to almost 40 hives!

While the bees do all the work collecting and making the honey, wax, pollen, and propolis, Henry and Dana do the rest by hand... We bottle and label the honey ourselves. We melt and filter our own wax and all candles are hand poured. After experimenting with many different recipes for our lip balm, we finally found the perfect one. All of our body balms and lip balms are created in small batches. 

We also have a farm out in Western Massachusetts where there is an abundance of (sugar) maple trees. So in the winter months, while the bees are all cozy in their hives, we switch to maple syrup. Our property was once the site of a fairly large sugaring operation which we would love to recreate one day. Our maple syrup is boiled over a wood fire, so there's a lot of labor and love that goes into it. The firewood is harvested by us from our own trees; we split and stack the wood ourselves. We do use reverse osmosis to help us cut down on boiling time... it's just the two of us, (and if we're lucky- Henry's son, Henrik, will help us too!) so we'll take any time-saving opportunities. 

Currently, Dana works as a kindergarten teacher and has been teaching for 23 years. Henry has been working as a welder for the last 30 years and opened his own (welding) business in 1996. While we both love our professions, beekeeping opened a whole new world for us. It is our dream to continue expanding and make this our full time business year round. We do not have a physical store, but you can find our products in a variety of places (see "Where to Find Us" section). When we are not busy with the bees (or our full time jobs), we are working on home improvement projects, tending to our chickens, ducks, and turkeys, or getting our hands dirty in the gardens.

Thank you for supporting us and making our dream happen!