Mint Hive Chronicles: A Story of Bees, Blooms, and Place
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For everyone joining us on this journey, transparency is our foundation. Here is a look at the reality of building Mint Hive from the ground up, the challenges we face, and why your early support is the lifeblood of this project.
Engage with the Mint Hive Keepers, Patrons and Members to create our interactive community to help us grow. Your feedback will help us refine and develop artifacts and experiences.
Community Guidelines
By becoming a member of the Mint Hive Chronicles community you shall be agreeing to support the stewardship objectives of the Keepers through shared learning, responsible patronage, and respect for the land and its pollinators. As members of a community, we are committed to keeping politics and divisive opinions to ourselves and staying focused on the homestead and its inhabitants. This is intended to be an uplifting space where we can learn from one another as we develop the Mint Hive Chronicles together.
And so it began…
April 2026: We purchased the 0.53 acre property in Burlington Junction, MO and started planning our future home only to realize how costly it would be to actually start building! After exploring a multitude of options we’ve loosely settled on a design for a starter home but budget constraints prevented us from getting started right away. So the brainstorming began, how can we grow our budget and build our homestead dream?
First Steps
We had to assess what was already growing on the half acre property and get things cleaned up. Mapping the lay of the land and planning were essential to determine the best location for the bee hives, garden beds, and where to build our future home. We also had to clean out and cover the cellar and get the well running again (still pending).
Wanting to stay true to the native landscapes, we began researching local plants and products they could produce with limited government oversight. After assessing the land and hours of conversation (with AI and each other) we decided to supplement our current gardens (on site and in Omaha) and use the existing trees to create and sell quality products from our harvested goods.
May 2026: As part of the journey, we created a following of friends and co-workers who were interested in evolution of the Keeper’s dream. While the Keepers have many ideas and wishful vision plans, life doesn’t always live up to expectations, so the business model is start small and build what works. Ideas led to hours of research about production laws and government restrictions, as well as, refining product ideas (and language/terminology) and determining equipment and facility requirements to get started. Meanwhile the Keeper was busy in the garden in Omaha, obtaining and/or planting seeds for our native perennials and personal cultivation vegetable gardens.
June 2026: The Keeper’s passionate sharing was met with overwhelming enthusiasm and interest in supporting our dream, as well as interest in getting their hands on the products he’s boasting. In order to capitalize on interest, we started to develop our business model, drafting a website, researching what perennials to add to our power house botanical gardens, and pricing out materials we need to get our garden beds and beehives going and growing.
Meanwhile, several of our plants started their journey in pots on our back porch in Omaha, Nebraska while we designed our garden spaces in Missouri. We’re currently growing clustered mountain mint, catnip, sage, wild bergamot, and anise hyssop– and working with a local native species grower to obtain lemon balm, carpenters herb, and maybe some yarrow. With the rise in gas prices, we must be intentional about when and which plants will be able to transfer to the land to be left unsupervised and which need to stay in Omaha a little longer.
While our website is still in development, our growing number of supporters are patiently waiting to contribute/join, wanting to gain exclusive access to artifacts, the joy of knowing they helped get the homestead grow, and access to the Mint Hive Chronicles where they can keep up on our progress, read field journals, and see the creation process in action.
June, Mid-Month Update: The Keepers have officially secured our website domain, mintybee.xyz and established WordPress as our hosting platform. We are so excited to get started and have begun migrating all our of drafted contents into their official pages!
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