Oso Honey Farm

Thanks to his botanist grandmother, Henry Storch could recite the Latin names of all the plants in his parent’s garden by the age of 5, and this early enthusiasm for flora and fauna continues to inform his work today as an uncommonly thoughtful apiarist. After teenage stints working in nurseries and on organic farms, Henry studied agriculture at OSU, learned to shoe horses (!) and eventually settled in the eastern foothills of the Coast Range, living in a hand-built cabin and working at sawmills in the winter when his farrier business slowed down. Encountering wild bee populations during his work in the timber industry was his lightbulb moment; he clearly saw that these bees were vastly different from the commercial populations he’d seen farmers using to pollinate crops, and that they’d developed resistance to mites and adapted to the cool, wet conditions of Oregon’s coastal forests.