Our Story (as Told by Founder Jeff Johnson) [Video]

Co-Founder Jeff Johnson (along with his labradors, Hank and Ellie) share the story of where the idea for Premier Bee Products originated, the company’s mission, and how they plan to help bees and beekeepers across the globe.

Watch the full video below.

Transcription:

But if we could come up with a way to advance plastic foundation, to help bees out and help beekeepers out, that could be really fun. And that's kind of what we came up with.

Hi, I'm Jeff Johnson. I'm one of the original co-founders of Premier Foundation. This is Ellie. And this is Hunker — his name is Hank. Come here, guys. Sit, Come on, sit down, sit.

They're kind of like kids; some days they mind better than other days.

When we kind of came up with a foundation that we wanted to maybe look at trying that, we started doing a lot of research on foundation. And all the literature out there, you know, for the existing plastic foundation talks about the size of the cells, like 5.1, 5.2, 5.3. But, you know, I brought a fresh set of eyes to that that that hadn't seen that before.

How are they measuring it? Because, you know, if you take the point on the top and measure vertical all the way down to the point in the bottom, that'll give you one dimensio. If you go vertical up and down from the furthest point to the furthest point versus if you go from left to right, straight across the cell, completely different measurement. And so when they talk about the size of the cell, I'm like, well, which size? Which one of those two are they measuring?

So I started calling all the existing manufacturers up. I got a hold of all of them. And what's interesting was they all gave me the same answer of how they measure a cell. They measure a string of 10 cells and divide it by 10. And my mind instantly went to, well, that's not the size of the cell. That's the size of 10 cells and 11 cell walls. I wanted to know what was the size of the cell that the bee lived in; one single cell for one bee. What size was it?

And so that left me to look at, well, I wonder what the bees make in nature if they don't have a preexisting pattern on a plastic foundation that they imprint on and dry out. If there's no pattern there, what are they going to do?

The academic people that I was working with recommended that I get samples of top bar hive comb because that doesn't have any existing pattern for the bees. So it's probably as close to natural comb as you can get without an existing pattern. And so I figured out how to utilize Craigslist, and for one summer I had people contact me through Craigslist that had top bar hives and I would get a sample from them of their comb. And then we would take that into the lab over at Augustana College or Augustana University, where I went to college years ago and we had a master's biology student over there that would take them, take them in the lab, put those samples underneath High-Resolution microscopes and measure them.

We ended up getting 98 samples of top bar hive comb that summer and we analyzed them all. And those those samples came from North Dakota all the way down to Oklahoma, and from Ohio all the way out to Utah. And we found out what the size of a natural cell was when you just measured from left to right or right to left horizontally, straight across a cell with no cell walls in it. And that's the dimension that we wanted to make our foundation.

But the other interesting thing is we also found that the cell wall thickness was significantly less on top bar hive comb than the existing plastic foundations. And I mean to the point of it's about 36% thinner in nature. The bees don't need that big, thick cell wall of wax there. They actually prefer a thinner cell wall.

So I now knew the dimensions of what I would like to make. The existing foundations, many of the characteristics of that foundation are determined by their manufacturing technique. It's not determined by what the bee wants. It's determined by injection molding.

So I knew the dimensions that we wanted and I knew the cell wall thinness that we wanted, you couldn't do it with the manufacturing techniques that everybody else was using. So we had to come up with a way to make what the bees wanted. We didn't try to force the bees to like what we could make. And that took me three and a half years to figure that out. But we finally got it figured out. So that's kind of how we came up with Premier Foundation.

And what we really wanted to do was to figure out a way to give the beekeeper advantages and also give the bees advantages with a new foundation.

For the beekeeper, because that cell wall is 36% thinner. If you look at a deep sheet and compare it to some of the competition, there's about 552 more cells per deep sheet of ours versus the competition, and it is due to a thinner cell wall. And if you think about that, if you've got a 10-frame hive and you've got 10 frames in it and each frame has 500 and some more cells — in that hive, you have got 5,000 more cells for those bees.

And that is a good thing for the bees, if it's brood or if it's storing honey or pollen. Any time you can have the right size cell and get 5,000 more of them in a hive, that's a really good thing for the bees. It's like taking a 10-frame box and turning it into an 11-frame box, but you get to do it for the price of 10 frames. The term we use is we are trying to figure out how to make a better mousetrap for both the beekeeper and the bees, and that's what led to all this.

And that's where it all started. At least in my mind, that's where it all started anyway.