Dave Rife keeps honeybees. Though maybe it would be more accurate to say honeybees keep Dave Rife — keep him steady and keep him present.
Rife began beekeeping seven years ago as therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.
About every two weeks, Rife treks to his backyard apiary, outside of Traverse City, Michigan, to visit the bees. Rife’s four hives are made up of weathered wooden boxes arranged in vertical stacks, perched on cinder blocks. A solar-powered electric fence runs in a circle around it all, to keep animals out. The place hums.
Two of the wooden stacks reach eye-level, and the other two are shorter, barely reaching Rife’s knees. As he pries the lid off of one hive, he speaks in a calm, low voice.
“So I got one buzzing around my head. It’s not happy,” he said. “So I’m just taking a moment to just be still for a sec. I’m not really worried about being stung.”
Rife spent eight years in the U.S. Air Force as a fuel manager, making sure aircrafts had enough oil and lubricants. But in 1991, after Desert Storm, he sensed that conflict in the Middle East could drag on indefinitely. “I didn’t want to be stuck there,” he said, “and possibly die.”
So he left the Air Force. But like so many veterans, Rife struggled to adjust back to life at home in the U.S., where it was difficult to find fulfilling work. He was plagued with nightmares, and oscillated between bouts of anger and depression. His marriage ended, and his relationship with his kids suffered.
“When you’re in the military, you’ve got a cadre, squadron, whatever you want to call it, of people that have your back and it’s a team and you’re working together on damn near everything,” he said. “And coming back to civilian life, after being fully indoctrinated into the military lifestyle, I had nobody.”
The Michigan Department of Military and Veterans Affairs offered Rife alternative PTSD treatments, like acupuncture and aromatherapy. He tried them, but they didn’t alleviate his symptoms.
A friend suggested he try wood turning, a type of carving where a lathe rotates a piece of wood against a sharp tool, gently molding it. It worked — something about the ritual of shaping wood into a beautiful object soothed him.
“You’re not living in the past, you’re not living in what happened to you, you’re not like, ‘How am I going to make it tomorrow?’ You’re right here, right now and that is a peaceful, quiet, quiet place,” Rife said. “So many nights I couldn’t sleep. I woke up from nightmares, (and) instead of grabbing something to drink or, you know, alcohol or drugs or whatever, I’d go out there and I’d turn (wood) for hours.”
Rife chased that soothed feeling. He later became friends with a Navy veteran who introduced him to Heroes to Hives, a beekeeping course designed for military service members and their families. During his first class, Rife was quiet and reserved.
“I didn’t want to like, you know, have to face any, ‘So what did you do?’ or ‘Why are you here?’ And that never happened. It never happened to me, and it still doesn’t happen,” he said. “So I started to open up a little bit and then open up a little bit more, and pretty soon I'm keeping bees!”
Rife doesn’t “take care” of honeybees — they do that on their own, he said. “That’s not my job and it’s not my goal. If I even thought that I’d be crazy because they’ve been on this planet a lot longer than we have. They know what they’re doing.”
Instead, his relationship with the bees is symbiotic. He monitors the colonies, ensuring they have enough resources and make it through winter. In return, working with the bees helps manage his PTSD symptoms.
In some ways, the rigid roles within a beehive are familiar.
“It’s just like being in the military. You can't have a group without somebody directing it; they have to work together,” he said. “It’s very similar with the hive. You can have a queen, but the queen’s not going to survive long without attendants and (other) bees taking care of the hive.”
Last spring, Rife went out to check on the bees. He found four of his then-six hives rich with what he calls resources: wax and honey. But they were full of dead honeybees. Across the U.S., commercial beekeepers suffered record honeybee losses in 2025, threatening the nation’s crops. It’s likely pollution, pesticides and climate change all played a role.
“It was devastating to go through that,” he said. “And just have to take all that apart and clean everything up and find, you know, thousands of carcasses of your friends, essentially.”
In the wake of the painful loss, Rife worked hard to rebuild his apiary from the two hives that survived. He said beekeeping is a meditative practice: “You got to have a mindset. You got to be calm. You have to be centered.”
In an ideal world, he said, Heroes to Hives’ therapeutic program would be available to any veteran who needs it.
“We get (back) into the civilian world, we’ve got nothing to protect anymore," he said. "But as a beekeeper, now, we’re working to protect the nation’s food security,” he said. “It allows veterans another way to access the outside world.”
Heroes to Hives is only funded through November 2025. Its main financial support comes from the federal farm bill, which is nearing the end of a one-year extension after congressional negotiations stalled in 2024.
The program doesn’t get funding from the Department of Veterans Affairs, because the VA doesn’t recognize beekeeping as a legitimate PTSD treatment. But two Heroes to Hives pilot programs run by the VA — one at a retirement home and another at a prison with a high population of veterans — are in the works.
“We’re hoping it’ll blossom into something more with the VA, and they actually recognize how valid it is as a therapy,” Rife said.
Thanks to Heroes to Hives, honeybees have become Rife’s companions — part of his family.
“They're not pets. To me, they’re not livestock. They are fully valid creatures,” he said. “I’m not gonna call it a miracle, ‘cause it’s not, but holy crap it feels like it.”
This story was produced as part of the Transom Story Workshop hosted by Interlochen Public Radio in August of 2025.
