6 APRIL 27-MAY 3, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | sters and guinea pigs over the years. But in the planned community of Rock Creek, there just wasn’t room for many more animals that lived outside of tanks. “Just sending this to you,” Charlie wrote. “But we’d have to have a ranch.” On a whim, Carolyn pulled up Zillow and searched for four- or fi ve-acre farms along the Front Range. “I came across this house that was eight bedrooms, seven baths for under a million dollars in Boulder County — which, like seven years or six years ago, was unheard of,” she recalls. When her mother, who lives with the family, walked in, Carolyn closed the com- puter, not wanting to explain what she was up to. When she went back online, she found an email from Charlie with a link to the same property. “I called him up and asked him if he had spyware on my machine,” she says. He didn’t. He’d simply done a search similar to hers and found the same listing. They called their realtor, went out to see the property in Lafayette...and bought it. The former owners had built a barn there in the ’70s, where they kept a few horses and a cow. The Petersons added a new barn, a “Chicken Manor,” a goat jungle gym and a duck pond to what they named Capella Ranch. Carolyn picked the name after reading in a book about birthdays that her major star is Capella. She was also in an a cappella group at the time, so the name fi t. The couple, their two now-adult daugh- ters and Carolyn’s mother all pitch in at the ranch. Charlie says they’ve been surprised that people are often willing to volunteer, but there’s never a shortage of work to do. The Petersons are considering expanding their operations by turning the half of the house they don’t live in into “a great retreat for women who like to drink wine,” as Carolyn puts it. Not an Airbnb, but something similar. In the meantime, the ranch’s non-human residential community has continued to grow over the past half-dozen years, mainly when Carolyn fi nds a new animal to take in while Charlie is away on business trips for his day job with Amazon Web Services. “I accidentally come across things,” she says. “We went to a chicken swap because we didn’t realize that we had so many roosters and we had to get rid of them. We went there with four roosters and came home with a goat.” Another time, she was listing some chick- ens for sale on Craigslist, but instead of going to check on her own post, she accidentally ended up on a page offering four alpacas and a llama. The woolly creatures became Capella Ranch residents for several years but now live on Harley’s Haven Ranch, a larger property in Colorado Springs. “They were interesting lawn ornaments, but we weren’t doing them justice,” Charlie says. “Now they’re down on ten acres and having fun, so much fun.” The Petersons sold Harley’s some of their alpaca equipment but donated the animals. Capella Ranch currently has sheep, Ni- gerian dwarf goats, Nubian goats, ducks, chickens, a few turkeys and, of course, a plethora of bees, the fi rst of which arrived in 2018. Animals are there to stay at the no-kill farm, Charlie says — though he does apolo- gize to the few bees he’s sure he’s accidentally squashed over the years. “We’re from Superior,” Carolyn laughs. “We can’t pluck a chicken!” Charlie had always been interested in beekeeping but never had the space to keep bees until the family moved to the ranch. He didn’t just start keeping bees, though: He became a swarm-catcher. Bees swarm when they reproduce, form- ing large balls of activity that can look quite intimidating to onlookers. But swarm-catch- ers are trained to handle them. “Trust me on this, you’ll never forget it,” Charlie says. “Every rescue presents its own challenge, sometimes dangerous, but there is nothing quite like the feeling of knowing you’ve secured the queen and the hive is safe.” People who see a swarm can call 1-844-SPY- BEES (779-2337), the Colorado State Beekeep- ers Association swarm and structural removal hotline, and a local beekeeper will come help. If the sighting is near Lafayette, Charlie gets the call, then brings the bees back to Capella Ranch after he snags them. He and daughter Cassie caught the ranch’s fi rst swarm in July 2018, an unusually late date for a swarm. That season generally starts in late April, as the weather warms, and lasts through June. “There should be a twelve-step program for the addiction of catching swarms,” Caro- lyn says. “When he got twenty-some-odd swarms on the property, it’s like, ‘We really need to do something else with this. Because this is cute, but….’” Charlie agreed that they needed to do something with all the bees, but they didn’t see the honey business as viable: The scale is big and the margins are small. “The thing that I just kept coming back to all the time is how amazing honeybees are,” Charlie recalls. “They’re so close to magic, and it’s just fascinating to watch. Everything about them has some benefi cial piece or part.” They were still searching for a way to showcase the wonders of bees when Charlie visited a Thornton bee supply store, Plan Bee. There he struck up a conversation with another customer who mentioned apitherapy, using bee products to improve health. Part of apitherapy is the air therapy found in bee huts. “I brought that idea home to Carolyn,” Charlie says. “We thought, ‘We have found the idea.’” Carolyn used her research powers to gather information about how huts work, fi nding examples online of covered wagon- like structures with beehives underneath and even systems that resemble tanning beds, where people slide in and have a case closed over their heads. She thought that would be too claustrophobic, though. And then she found the Savannah Bee Company in Georgia, which has huts that look like “something out of Candy Land or a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale,” as the business says on its website. “I would love to see bee huts around the country and the world,” says Ted Dennard, founder and head beekeeper at the Savan- nah Bee Company. “At the end of the day, our mission is to save the bees and raise awareness about the wonder of the honeybee however we can.” The Petersons decided to go that route, building two cedar huts shaped like irregular pentagons. The cedar contributes to the aroma in the huts, though Charlie says it was selected for durability in the Colorado weather. Another Carolyn Craigslist fi nd contributed to the huts’ unique shape: She discovered Joe McCartney, who lives in Hudson and builds saunas and sheds in that shape. McCartney created customized structures that include a spot for the hives. The slanted roof concentrates the aerosol so that people can breathe it in while they’re lying fl at. “Everyone comes out with a differ- ent experience,” Carolyn says. “They get in there. They lie down. They take in the whole thing, and then they just sort of concentrate on the humming of the bees.” When bees make honey, Charlie explains, there’s a lot of water in it at fi rst, so the in- sects work to reduce the moisture content by fl apping their wings. As it evaporates, the moisture is carried into the air to form an aerosol that people fi nd therapeutic. The bees also create an electromagnetic fi eld with their vibration, which is at a fre- quency that’s calming to the human para- sympathetic nervous system, a network of nerves that helps relax the body. Some people can feel the fi eld, but most notice the smell fi rst, Carolyn says. Underneath the scent of cedar, there is the aromatic tang of the bees at work, almost like the smell of a newborn baby, but with an extra oomph. “That is all the pollen and propolis [made from the pollen of cone-bearing trees] and nectars and amino acids and essential oils that the bees are bringing in to make the honey,” Carolyn says. “It’s just kind of an odd smell, and that’s supposed to be very good to breathe in.” In Slovenia, this bee experience has been used to calm fi refi ghters after hard jobs, children who have behavioral problems at school, and parents of those children, who might need some re- Bee Here Now continued from page 5 continued on page 8 Bee huts at Capella Ranch; Charlie Peterson inspects a beehive cover. EVAN SEMÓN EVAN SEMÓN
