Inside Premier Bee Products: From Bee Yard Ideas to Manufacturing

BTPS: Inside Premier Bee Products - From Bee Yard Ideas to Manufacturing

Jeff Johnson

And now he's cutting mortises right now. So he's on the other side of the machine and all it is, it's got a four-head spindle. It's a CNC with a four-head spindle that's in there and all it is is going like that.

But it depends if the board goes down or if it goes in what you're making. So that's amazing. Yeah, it the technology in that machine is unbelievable.

Jeff Ott

This isn't what I expected. I'm standing on the production floor at Premier Bee Products in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, watching pieces of lumber move through machines that cut them with remarkable speed and precision. There are frames being made, hive bodies, equipment moving through different stages of production, and standing next to me is Premier Founder Jeff Johnson, explaining what I'm seeing as quickly as I can take it all in. I'm Jeff Ott, and this is something a little different from Beekeeping Today. Consider this a Beekeeping Today field report. Today I'm taking you inside Premier Bee Products. Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast Shorts, your quick dive into the latest buzz in beekeeping.

Becky Masterman

In 20 minutes or less, we'll bring you one important story, keeping you informed and up to date.

Jeff Ott

No fluff, no fillers, just the news you need.

Becky Masterman

Brought to you by Betterbee, your partners in Better Beekeeping.

Jeff Ott

A few minutes earlier, Jeff and I were upstairs in his office overlooking the woodenware production floor. Premier hasn't been making woodenware for generations. And in fact, that turned out to be an important part of the story, because when Premier entered woodenware manufacturing, Jeff says they had the opportunity to start from a clean slate.

Jeff Johnson

Well, you know, we've only been doing woodenware manufacturing. I think we're in year number four. One of the biggest advantages that we had is we started from scratch. So we didn't have equipment or the way things were done. We had got to look at a clean slate, and so I brought in my woodenware engineers that had been involved in some other industries, and we kind of modernized what we're doing in the beekeeping industry as far as box and frame production goes.

Jeff Ott

And then we headed downstairs.

Jeff Johnson

The dovetail machine, you know, you've got a mortise and a tenon. And depending on if it's a long side or a short side of the box, is where the mortise and tenon go. The machine cuts both of them, but it depends on which side of the machine you're feeding the boards if it does the mortise or the tenon.

Because remember when we were watching from upstairs, she was on this side of the machine and she was cutting tenons and now he's cutting mortises right now so he's on the other side of the machine and all it is it's got a four-head spindle it's a CNC with a four-head spindle That's that's in there and all it is is going like that, but it depends if the board goes down or if it goes in what you're making. The technology in that machine is unbelievable. Like I said, they've been using that That machine they've been using in the cabinet industry for probably 20 some years now.

Jeff Ott

And that makes the box strong.

Jeff Johnson

Oh, so it is the strongest joint they use in cabinet making. The other thing is the only way that joint will go together is square.

So you don't have to like put them together and then try to square them up. It's square the instant it goes together. You can't put these things together the wrong way.

Jeff Ott

After walking the floor, we went back upstairs and apparently I wasn't doing a very good job of hiding how impressed I was. Well, we're back in the Premier Bee Products boardroom. Just got off the floor. It's not what I expected.

Jeff Johnson

Well, okay, what did you expect?

Jeff Ott

Well I wasn't sure what to expect. I mean it was much more involved. I mean, coming from a backyard beekeeper, hobbyist beekeeper, who hammers things together with a hammer and nail or maybe a wood mallet or something like that. But to come see how you do it on a production level for commercial beekeepers around the world was bigger than my brain was ready to acknowledge.

Jeff Johnson

You know, Jeff, I hear that. Especially like we'll have some of our commercial customers will stop in to pick an order up. And you give them a tour and they are just you can just kind of see their eyes light up and they are so into it they're almost like a little kid looking at Santa's workshop, you know?

And I kind of had the same sense from you and your brother today that it's like, holy smokes, there really is something going on here. Because I mean, we're a big manufacturing company.

What we do is we manufacture foundation frames and boxes. And letting people see how it's really done on the scale that we're doing it. I mean, I never dreamed we'd be where we're at doing this eight years ago when we started.

So it's sure been fun.

Jeff Ott

Santa's workshop isn't a bad description. But what interested me wasn't simply the size of the operation, it was how Premier got here. Because woodenware wasn't where this company started.

It started with plastic foundation. Since you started your business on the plastic foundation and we talked to you at NAHBE a couple years ago, I believe, and you told us the story of that. But to come here to the plant to actually see where it starts is a beekeeper holding a piece of foundation in the bee yard or in the basement, assembling a frame, and then coming here.

And seeing how it starts out as little extruded nodules and how your machines form it together to create that beautiful foundation and then how the wax is applied and then how it goes into frames. That's amazing. And I look at it and I say, boy, it's been six to eight years you said? The journey started nine years ago.

Nine years. And this is where Jeff said something that for me explains quite a bit about Premier's approach to product development. They didn't simply decide what they wanted the foundation to look like and then manufacture it.

First, they had to figure out what the bees wanted.

Jeff Johnson

It took a good two years just to figure out what size the foundation should be. And I mean I didn't come up with the size, the bees came up with the size. We had to figure out how to make it and it took us a good two and a half, three years to figure that out. And once we figured that out and got some of it out there, the bees jumped all over it. But again it comes down to we're not trying to make the bees like what we could make easily. We let the bees make what Mother Nature wants them to make and then as a manufacturer we had to figure out how to make it and that's been challenging. It was a real challenge back in those days, but we got it figured out. Figuring it out once is one thing.

Jeff Ott

Figuring out how to reproduce it thousands and thousands of times is another. And not only how to make it or duplicate it if I can say that, how to make it, but then how to make it on a production level where you're producing so many frames, so many sheets of foundation every day, not to mention every year.

Jeff Johnson

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's just been crazy and you know, I'm not a manufacturer, I'm not an engineer. I mean I owned a power sports business and truthfully I'm just kind of a sales guy.

But I've got an extremely good engineering team around me that I come to them with some crazy idea and they roll their eyes and go, oh my gosh, and then they figure out how to do it. And then we test it and if the bees like it, we keep doing it. It's kind of like our, you know, one of the biggest advantages that Premier Bee Products has had is we started from scratch.

So we got to look at things with a different set of eyes than people that have been doing this in the beekeeping industry for years and years. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but typically when you do something for twenty, thirty years, you end up just naturally tending to kind of get blinders on to the opportunities that are out there to maybe do things a little different, a little better. And we always said that we wanted to do things better, but we had to define what's better.

And we said better would be if it's better for the bees and better for the beekeeper, then it's worth putting time and effort and resources into trying to figure it out. And that's really what we've kind of built our company on.

Jeff Ott

That idea borrowing solutions from outside traditional beekeeping manufacturing, showed up again when Premier began making hive bodies. One example was something as basic as the corner joint. Well there's several unique qualities of the hive boxes. One the first thing you did was improve on the corners.

Jeff Johnson

At that time there was really nobody in the industry that was doing anything for a corner of a hive box other than a just a traditional old finger joint. And there's nothing wrong with that joint. It's a fine joint, it's easy to cut, it's pretty forgiving um on tolerances, but it's not very strong and it's not square.

And so How could we make it better? Well, we figured out by going to people in the cabinet industry. And all the cabinet people use a half-blind dovetail because it's extremely strong, it has 40% less exposed end grain, which that's where all the rots.

It's on the end grain, so we decrease that 40%. And it also goes together only one way and that's square. So you don't have to fight to get them square.

The boxes are square from the minute they go together.

Jeff Ott

And that's really amazing. And whether someone was to buy a knockdown kit and assemble it themselves or they buy a complete box here and they can buy it with frames. I think I even bought some a box with frames.

It's square. It can only go together square and that's really nice. Because I have a bunch of out-of-square finger joint boxes in my bee yard.

Jeff Johnson

And you know it's square if you get the first box built on Monday morning or if you get the last box built on Friday afternoon. They're all the same.

Jeff Ott

But changing the way outside corners of a hive body fit together is primarily about manufacturing and durability. Another Premier project began with something very different: research into what honey bees do inside their nest.

And the second big thing about the hive bodies is the Propolis Hive. And we talked a little bit about this on the floor. That was released a couple years ago if I remember right at North American Honey Bee Expo where I first saw it. Can you talk a little bit about the Propolis Hive treatment and what it is?

Jeff Johnson

The Propolis Hive was kind of a pet project of mine way back in the beginning. It's probably been nine, maybe ten years ago now. I was just thinking about getting into this and I went to the uh South Dakota Honey Producers, had their summer meeting, and I thought, well, I'm gonna go see what this is all about.

I went out to it. There was probably forty people at it, but I didn't realize they probably those forty people probably had a million hives between them. But one of the speakers at the meeting was uh Dr. Marla Spivak um from the University of Minnesota Bee Lab and she was talking about some of her research with propolis envelopes at that time.

And I remembered that because I always thought, you know what, that would be interesting to be able to figure out how to make a beehive where the bees thought it was the inside of a tree. And we were busy trying to figure plastic out and all the other things with growing a business, but I had always had that in the back of my mind. And so I had a little bit of time a few years back.

I started messing with it. And I actually went up, talked to Dr. Spivick, started doing some research, and we finally figured out how to um make the inside of a Langstroth box be like the inside of a tree. To the bees.

And so that's where the Propolis Hive came from. It was all based on the research that the University of Minnesota did. The science behind having a propolis envelope in a beehive is so solid that I felt like we have to figure out how to get this to the public so the people that have done the research, their research can help beekeepers around the world. It doesn't do any good to figure all this stuff out if we can't get it into the real everyday lives of bees and beekeepers.

And that's what we're trying to do with the Propolis Hive.

Jeff Ott

I have a couple of these boxes in my own apiary. So naturally our conversation turned to what I'd seen and yes, Jeff turned the interview around on me.

Jeff Johnson

How long have you had them out in the bee yard? Two seasons? One season. One season. So they went in early this spring?

Jeff Ott

They went in early- to mid-season last season.

Jeff Johnson

Mid-season last season. Okay. So have you looked at them lately? How are the bees uh filling in the grooving?

Jeff Ott

Yeah, and I haven't well as we're sitting here, it's been mm probably four weeks since I've been on those hives specifically.

Jeff Johnson

Okay. I know that what we've seen in our testing and stuff, we thought originally that it would probably take it an entire year to see much of any propolis collection and actually they respond to it very quickly within, you know, a couple of months, you'll see significant amounts of propolis deposited on the inside of the hives.

Jeff Ott

And I did notice that by the fall last fall, I noticed that there definitely was greater than a standard uh smooth, planed box and I was like, yeah, it's working, it's really going. So I was really pleased with that. Not every idea at Premier begins with Jeff Johnson or his engineering team. Sometimes somebody else has already built something clever and Premier finds it.

Jeff Johnson

I came across this telescoping top cover from a guy down in Missouri, Bill George and his wife Tammy, have Crooked Hill Beekeeping. Actually when I first met Bill, he was a highway patrolman in Missouri. And I didn't meet him on the side of the road for a speeding ticket.

But I met Bill and Tammy, and Bill, kind of as a sideline, is a woodworker, and Bill is really picky. And he had developed this lid and it's just like incredible. And I was down there early this spring.

I saw he had a bunch of 'em made there that he was selling in his little shop and we hatched the idea of we should try selling those things through um Premier's website, our e-commerce site. We got the story from Bill. He builds them himself.

He's got an Amish friend down there that bends all the Galvalume for him. Uh we came up with the name Legacy Lid, because these things will last for my generation and the next generation. They are that good quality.

I mean you saw one out on the plant floor. What'd you think of it?

Jeff Ott

Well I think they're really really wonderful and they would do away with a bunch of bricks in my yard too. They're they're really solid, really stout, and they wouldn't blow off.

Jeff Johnson

My marketing team did a video with Bill and Tammy kind of talking about it. So I would just have you go look at that on our website because it's Bill and Tammy. They're just salt of the earth good people. It's just a good story and it's an outstanding product.

Jeff Ott

And I think that's probably a good place to leave our visit. I went to Premier expecting to see bee equipment being manufactured, and I did, but what I hadn't expected was how much of the story would be about ideas. Looking at how another industry solves a problem, listening to researchers, watching what the bees themselves do, or recognizing when another beekeeper has already come up with a pretty good solution.

And I want to thank Jeff Johnson and the Premier team for opening their doors, letting my brother and me wander around their operation, and letting me carry my microphone while they did so. From Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I'm Jeff Ott. Thanks for coming along.

You've been most gracious showing us around my brother and me around your facility, your factory.

Jeff Johnson

It's been uh the highlight of the week. Thank you for stopping in and getting the tour. I sure appreciate it.