A Luzerne County couple’s fortuitous pandemic friendship with a beekeeper nearing the end of his life combined with Navajo traditions to form the backbone of Old Man John’s Coffee and Honey House.
Owner Lakota Maglioli grew up between Utah, Arizona and Pennsylvania. She’s Diné, which is part of the Navajo Nation. As a kid, her summers were split between one grandmother in Tuba City on the Navajo reservation, and the other in Mountain Top.
"I always loved this area, and part of me knew I'd always somehow come back here," she said.
When the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown began in March 2020 Maglioli and her husband, Mark Maglioli, were looking for a hobby. They wanted to make mead but honey was expensive. So they thought maybe they should keep bees.
That's when "Old Man John" showed up at their house as Mark was outside working on a Monte Carlo.
"He's like 'Oh, hey ... you like that car?' And Mark's like 'Yeah'. And he's like 'Oh, well, I have something to show you ... get in,'" Lakota Maglioli recalled.
Maglioli chuckled retelling the story, standing near the front windows of their coffee shop in Luzerne.
John Baronitis was not practicing any of the early pandemic social rules — no mask, and definitely not six feet away, she said.
Baronitis took Mark to see a car he wanted to sell. He had cancer. After that, Mark and Lakota helped him with anything he needed. They became best friends.
“He wanted to give us his apiaries in return," Lakota Maglioli said of his beehives.
Baronitis died in February 2024.
The couple started selling their honey at farmers markets and found there was a demand. They opened the retail shop on Main Street in the borough in December.
Now it’s expanding into the first female indigenous-owned coffee house in Northeast Pennsylvania. They’ll hold a grand opening for the coffee side of things on Thursday, March 20.
“We did want to create a more community space for, I think, people who are, of course, not indigenous, but then also indigenous as well," she said. "Because I feel like that's something that we've been lacking in Northeastern Pennsylvania in general.”
Drawing on indigenous traditions
The couple infuses beekeeping with indigenous practices that Lakota Maglioli grew up with. She uses a specific blend of herbs used during Diné ceremonies to smoke out the bees.
"So we use sage, and then we also use, like trees, sticks that we find from the ground, or anything that's native to them. So it's not ... these horrible bee chemicals that are you're just spraying on them, because eventually that's what's going to go to the customer ... That's what's going to go to, you know, in your bellies," she said.
Beekeepers smoke the bees out of hives for a variety of reasons, mostly to pull honey.
The more natural, holistic approach helps the bees, despite being an aggressive species, stay calm, she said.
"It benefits us, but at the same time, like it is a living creature ... it's something that's providing food for us. And so even just how you practice ceremony and how you eat food, even just from being Navajo, that's what we were taught, was just you have to be attentive towards everything. So that's what we want to do with the bees, is kind of show them that there's not an ill intention," Maglioli said.
They pull honey twice a year — in the spring and in the fall. They sell traditional honeys like wildflower but there's also infusions including pumpkin spice, matcha or ghost pepper, which Lakota says is a big hit.
They also created a medicinal line from the honey and a proprietary blend of Navajo herbs.
"We are looking to kind of ... expand the medicinal purposes of honey and applying them essentially to the recipes that have been passed down through my family," she said.
Baked goods, craft drinks, and more
Maglioli is working with local baker, Danielle Crisano, who owns Domestic Goddess Goods.
The drink specials and pastries will be based on Navajo traditional foods and ingredients. The muffins and scones and other coffee shop items will include juniper berry, blue corn, sage, piñon and prickly pear.
Craft drinks will feature Counter Culture coffee, matcha, chai, and honey-based beverages, like the Rez Dog, a rich, maple and honey latte with a kick of cardamom or the Hive Mind Matcha Latte, made with Old Man John’s signature matcha honey.
"What our whole goal with this store and with this shop was kind of to normalize indigenous practices," she said.
Maglioli honors the indigenous land that the shop is on. Bags at the shop note that the region is Lenape territory.
"Which is what we're based on," she said.
Lakota hopes to find Lenape people and work together.
"We're trying to knock out any of those stereotypes and kind of just, again, humanize is a very strong word, but it really is humanizing, like our tribe ... you know, introducing that to people in our community, in the area, to understand that, yeah, we're everyone is everyone and people are people," she said.
Baronitis taught Lakota and Mark everything he knew about honey, bees and apiaries.
One pandemic hobby and five years later, a photo of him hangs on the wall in the shop that bears his name.
"We had to … John, like he's himself, but it was also like the overall idea of who he was, and then just what he represented, we wanted to represent the same things too," she said.
The grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held on Thursday, March 20, at 5:30 p.m. at 63 Main St., Luzerne. Free drip coffees will be available along with samples of house pastries. Local vendors will also offer samples.
For more details, visit www.oldmanjohnsapiary.com
