May 12, 2021

Bees really owe a debt of gratitude to Jeff Johnson’s inability to retire.

Johnson, one of the founders of Sioux Falls-based Premier Bee Products, thought he’d retire at 50 when he sold his power sports dealership to Vern Eide Motorcars in 2014. Except, he wasn’t actually ready.

“I was too young,” Johnson said.

About seven years later, Johnson and his Premier Bee Products co-founders are building a 10,000-square-foot facility in northern Sioux Falls at 1300 E. Dike Drive, just north of Fernson Brewing Co. off of North Cliff Avenue.

The new facility will allow the 18-month-old company to triple production of its bee foundations, which bees use as a base to build their honeycomb.

And as the beekeeping community keeps finding those foundations, the demand keeps rolling in. Their customer segments include commercial beekeepers as well as beekeeping hobbyists.

“The bees love it, and that’s the best feedback,” said Matthew Schock, who works with Fisheye Marketing to create marketing materials for Premier Bee Products and has talked with customers about their experience.

It’s a niche market Johnson stumbled into after hearing about a small South Dakota bee foundation company that went out of business.

He and his partners — Mark Heiden, an engineer with a background in the plastics industry, longtime business partner Brad Snyders and Paul Schock, a partner at Bird Dog Equity — started to realize they’d found in beekeeping an industry that hadn’t seen updates since the mid-1990s.

Existing plastic foundations were made to fit what was possible from a manufacturing perspective, but Premier Bee wanted to focus on nature first.

“We figured out what the bees wanted and then figured out how to make it,” Johnson said.

The result is a foundation that mimics conditions created in nature. Thinner walls between cells in the foundation allow for more cells to fit onto one sheet, and each cell is measured based on the size of hive cells made by actual bees.

It took 3 1/2 years to get the technology to make these foundations work, but now the demand has increased so rapidly those machines are now running 24 hours a day, Johnson said.

That demand starts with the bees. The bees show that they like the product by quickly taking to it as a foundation to build their hive. Then, the beekeepers like to see their bees happy, so they buy more.

“Every beekeeper that puts it in their hive, they’re like, ‘Wow, bees just love this stuff,’ ” Matthew Schock said. “There’s the science behind it, and then there’s the actual results, and the results have been nothing short of fun to watch.”

Since opening in December 2019, the company has grown to nine full-time employees. Its products are sold online, directly to commercial beekeepers and through a network of beekeeping retail supply stores.

The demand has caused Premier Bee Products to outgrow its current facility, a commercial space leased on North Sixth Avenue near Catfish Bay.

They couldn’t produce more in that facility even if they wanted to, Johnson said, which is why they’re excited about the new building, which is expected to open July 1.

“If the last two years are any indication, it’s just going like crazy,” Johnson said of the demand for Premier Bee foundations. “We’re selling millions of sheets of this stuff a year.”