Boulder County is known as a place where one can find all sorts of alternative therapies.
An eager audience seeking health and wellness can find everything from salt spas to sensory deprivation tanks, to yoga with baby goats.
And now for the first time in Colorado, bee huts.
According to Charlie Peterson, beekeeper and co-owner of Capella Ranch, this is only the third such facility in the United States.
Here, the natural busy work of hundreds of thousands of bees is harnessed to help people relax.
"Charlie falls asleep, I get tingly, and our oldest daughter levitates," says Charlie's wife and Capella Ranch co-owner, Carolyn Peterson, talking about what happens when her family members each take time to sit in a bee hut.
Just seven years ago, the Petersons were raising their two daughters in Rock Creek, a sprawling neighborhood in Superior.
They had always been animal lovers, their home filled with domestic pets of all kinds.
Carolyn says an odd twist of fate had them look at a ranch for sale in Lafayette.
"And we fell in love. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into," she said.
"We were exploring the different types of animals we could keep and what we could do. And I thought bees sounded really fascinating," said Charlie.
"And the more I read about them, I thought it would be great to try."
Charlie Peterson subsequently signed up for the swarm rescue hotline with the Boulder County Beekeepers Association.
He then got his first hive.
"And it didn't make it over the winter, but I certainly, shall we say, got the bug, and wound up catching more swarms in subsequent years, and it got to the point a couple years ago where Carolyn said, 'Okay, Charlie, you got 25 hives. What are you gonna do with all those bees?'," said Charlie.
While the Petersons do sell honey, Charlie says it's a tough business with low profit-margins and stiff local competition.
So he started asking around about what else people do with bees.
"I was down in Denver picking up some equipment for the hives and talked to a guy named Dakota Lyons at Plan Bee. He said, 'hey, there's this thing called hive aerosol apitherapy, which is where you are breathing the vapor that comes from the beehive. And it brings with it all the same good stuff, the antioxidants, the vitamins, minerals, everything that's in just eating honey. When that aerosolizes, you're now breathing the same thing. So you're getting all the goodness from the honey sort of was a direct shot into your lungs.' And it seems a little odd, sure," said Charlie.
"And I heard about that and I thought, okay, sounds interesting."
The Petersons did research and discovered that hive aerosol apitherapy is popular in Europe, especially in Slovenia, Austria and Hungary.
That therapy is used for allergies, asthma, lung fibrosis, and other respiratory ailments.
But the Petersons say they're not trying to provide a medical treatment.
"We're not doctors, and we're not trying to promote the bee huts as saying, 'Oh, this is some magic, curative kind of a thing.' We're just discovering that a lot of people are having real positive outcomes after they visit. And one of those positive outcomes is just relaxation," said Charlie.
The huts at Capella Ranch look like fairytale cottages for elfin creatures.
Based on European designs, they have slanted roofs and are made of cedar.
But in a bee hut, there's not a lot of space between the bees and the people.
There are two entrances on opposite sides of the bee hut.
On the south side is a tiny horizontal slit where the bees fly in to get to the hives.
This side has a door that can open so the beekeeper can access the hives to check on the bees and to remove honey.
But on the north side of the beehive is a regular door.
Inside is a step up to a bench.
"The bench is above where all of the hives are loaded into, and there's a very, very heavy-duty stainless steel mesh screen underneath the slatted boards," said Carolyn.
"So you're on top of the cedar bench, but they're not coming through."
That's right. If you want to experience hive aerosol apitherapy, you go into the bee hut, shut the door and sit or lay down on a bench inches away from hundreds of thousands of bees working diligently to make honey and feed their babies.
While the Petersons seem to have a 'build it and they will come' attitude, they say they've checked out apitherapy claims by doing research and with their own observations.
Carolyn says there are three main factors at play that seem to contribute to the bee huts effect on people
One is energy.
"There's a lot of energy that comes off of a beehive. It has a highly ionized air that they create. They also have a magnetic field that they put around their hive," said Carolyn.
The Petersons bought an electromagnetic meter to check out this claim.
"So we tested the hives and it sort of moves the needle, not off the chart, but it at least moves so that we know that there's some sort of a magnetic energy coming off," she said.
Another aspect is the sound of their buzzing.
"And it's almost like a white noise of humming. Sometimes you get the zing of the bee that you would expect to have, that's more rare. Sometimes you'll hear a clicking noise, kind of like rice krispies, that we believe is the bees chewing up wax and putting it different places," she said.
Carolyn says the bees wings are what make hive aerosol apitherapy especially effective.
So what are the bees actually doing inside the hive?
"They'll bring in pollen and nectar and they'll put it into the comb and they'll add a lot of water," said Carolyn.
"When they do that, it's about 70% water and they have to move their wings and flap around and work that mixture to get it from 70% to 20% then they'll cap it as honey. But as they're doing this, that 50 point difference is where the aerosol comes out where they're flapping their wings and dehydrating it so that it comes out through the slats and you're breathing that change," she said.
I did try the experience myself.
And while I was mostly preoccupied with getting bee sounds, it did feel like I was eavesdropping on a large family's conversation.
There's no telling what's in it for the bees, but for some people, Carolyn says the bees offer a kind of epiphany.
"I have a lot of people who come out from the experience talking about feeling like they're a part of a well organized community. That the whole concept of bees and how they work has been quite powerful for some people who think that if they can get that organized, maybe we should be able to as well," she said.
This storywas shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico including Aspen Public Radio.