Dan bought his first Primal Bee hive because he wanted to prove it didn't work.
He'd lost all three of his colonies the season before, gone looking for what he'd done wrong, and landed instead on a set of claims he couldn't bring himself to believe.
"There's no way someone hasn’t come up with this before," he remembers thinking. So he read every word on the website, concluded it was overselling, and bought one anyway on the theory that the fastest way to settle an argument is to watch the other side fail.
Why his first three beehives died
Dan came to beekeeping the long way around. In May 2016, at 23, his Coast Guard career ended unexpectedly, and with it the plan he'd built his life around: twenty years of service, another twenty in federal law enforcement, retirement at 58.
What came after was a long stretch of depression; and somewhere in the middle of it he came across a five-minute beekeeping video. He was so fascinated, that he bought the bee manual it referenced and spent his days piecing through it.
For years that was as far as it went.
Getting a hive going ran about $500, which he didn't have, along with the savings and the sense of direction to go with it.
Then came steadier work and steadier footing, and the interest he'd never quite dropped came back around. He helped a friend with his hives on and off, the school where he worked kept a couple, and last year he finally ran three of his own.
All three died over the course of the season, which he puts down to being a first-year beekeeper with no mentor, working from books and YouTube. His conclusion was blunt: either he was woefully incompetent, which he allows is possible, or a system that's been around more than a hundred years was due for an upgrade.
Why an absconded colony still built comb in August
It took him a while to actually go through with it. When he did, the package he installed absconded, which in hindsight was predictable, since he'd put them in during August with no forage available and nothing for them to do. He took the hive apart expecting the confirmation he'd been looking for, and instead found they'd built a significant amount of comb before leaving. "This should not be happening in August," he says. "There's something to this."
That was enough to get him to put an inquiry through the Primal Bee website and start talking to Yotam about what an actual operation would take. The first conversation was about 80 hives, backed by a friend who wanted to invest, but the land fell through and took the plan with it. He came back and asked about 50 instead, and that scale worked.
Around the same time he met Jason Graham at the Midwest Bee Expo, where they talked bees for a couple of hours and Jason handed over his cell number. "That's very dangerous to do to me, because I will," Dan says. He reached out with what he estimates was about a thousand questions, and eventually stopped asking permission and simply informed Jason that he was now his mentor.
How he found apiary sites for 50 hives
Which left the practical problem of fifty hives arriving with nowhere to go. Jason's suggestion was Facebook Marketplace: post about pollination services and see who responds.
Dan wrote the post, paid roughly three dollars to boost it, and got seventeen replies from people with real acreage who liked bees, liked honey, had no time to keep any themselves, and had land sitting unused. He now runs six apiary sites outside Milwaukee.
The hives went out in February and March, and the bees went in that April.
What to expect from a first year of beekeeping
Every beekeeper knows how a first year is supposed to go.
You don't harvest, you hope the colonies survive and build out, you might get a super on if things go well, and mostly you learn.
Dan had also priced in his own doubts about the yield claims, reasoning that if the hive doubles output, then doubling a first-year yield of nothing still leaves you with nothing.
In June he ran his first harvest, pulling six frames deliberately, just enough to test his extraction setup before scaling up. At the time he put a rough estimate on what was still out there. By the end of the season the actual figure came in at 2,100 pounds. "Year one," he says. "That should not happen."
They have a lot of honey left on their empty frames, and he expects to get at least one more harvest in this year.
Insulated hive vs wooden hive: a side-by-side comparison
The figure that tends to convince other beekeepers isn't the harvest, though. It's the comparison he set up at one of his sites, unprompted, because he wanted to see it himself.
Three hives went on the same pallet in the same location: a brand-new wooden hive on bare plastic foundation, a wooden hive from the previous year that was fully drawn out and ready to go, and a Primal Bee hive. Each got a package installed at the same time.
By midsummer the Primal Bee hive held two full deep supers of honey, while the drawn-out wooden hive from last year had most of a single medium and the new wooden hive was still barely building up its brood nest. "It's insane seeing that on a side by side in the exact same location on the exact same pallet," he says.
Out of 51 hives he's lost one, and he can account for it: a package queen that never took, a failed supersedure after that, and laying workers by the time he got to it.
Varroa mite counts in an insulated beehive
Dan reads the emails Primal Bee sends out and says he agrees with most of what's in them, with one exception he's prepared to argue about.
"It says time and time again, this is not a magic box. This is not fix all your problems. You still have to take care of your bees. It just gives them a better environment to do what they do naturally."
His response: "That I am going to call on, because this absolutely is a magic box."
What he's basing that on is a mite check. His worst-performing Primal Bee hive came back at two mites with no treatment applied, on Buckfast-line bees with nothing unusual about the genetics. One of his wooden hives at the same site came back at 93.
He knows how that sounds. "I'm not in some magic mite-free bubble," he says. "They exist. They're right next to the Primal hive."
That being said, he's extremely optimistic, given this year's harvest and how well the hive has done so far.
Advice for first-year beekeepers
His advice to anyone starting out is to have fun and to question everything, and he applies that to his own mentor as readily as to anyone else. Jason is a master beekeeper with a doctorate in entomology, and Dan will happily call him an absolutely brilliant man, none of which stops him from going out and finding a second and third source anyway.
"He's not the only source that I check."
Next year he wants 150 hives, and the year after that 300, which is roughly what he figures he and his wife can run as a two-person operation, and finding the land is the part he's least worried about. What he doesn't have yet is a Wisconsin winter behind him, which is the test he's most curious about and the one thing a good season can't tell him.
"I'll have a better bit of data next year for how they survive the winter. But how they're surviving the season is nuts."
You can follow Dan’s journey on his instagram @reppenhives
