There may be life off the ranch, but any Fremont County farmer or rancher will tell you – The #aglife is “the good life!” #Aglife is a County 10 series, brought to you by Wyoming Community Bank, that pulls the curtain back on farm and ranch life in Fremont County.
One of the oldest family-owned businesses in Fremont County continues to thrive despite one of the worst summers on record for honey production. Ibach Honey began in the 1950s when it was owned by Walt Fliegner.
In 1969, Gale Ibach purchased the business from Fliegner and now his son Mike runs the operation along with long-time associate John Martinez. Though the label reads “Ibach Honey” it lists Gale, Mike, and John on every bottle or jug they distribute.
“I worked for him (Fliegner) in high school,” Gale said. “He had a shop on West Main across from the A&W.”
Gale was a teacher and coach at Riverton High School, which had him looking for a way to bolster his income.
“I had to do something,” Gale said. “I was a schoolteacher.”
It was a combination that extended to his sons. Mike was a teacher and coach at Newcastle and Thermopolis, coming home to help with the family business each summer before he purchased it outright from his father in 1993.
Younger brother Pat is also a teacher and coach, currently working at Wyoming Indian Middle School.
All three of their wives are teachers or administrators. Linda, Gale’s wife, retired after a long career teaching elementary school in Fremont County. Mike’s wife Jodi is the superintendent for Fremont County School District 25 in Riverton and Pat’s wife Kim is a teacher at Frontier Academy.
Gale taught for 18 years, then switched to his honey business, and selling cars.
“Pat and I worked for Dad during the summers in high school,” Mike said.
Ibach Honey is tucked away on North Federal with a production facility, loading dock, and equipment storage all in one location east of Fremont Chevrolet.
Their production and transportation center may be in one location in town, but their business extends from Shoshoni to Dubois and the foothills of the Wind River Mountains.
“We used to have hives in Worland, but we stick to Fremont County now,” Mike said.
When Gale started the business, all the work was done by hand in placing, retrieving, and transporting hives. Now the hives are transported, four to a pallet, and loaded with a forklift. The bottom of the pallet serves double duty as the base of the hive.
The weight of the hives varies throughout the year, from 60 pounds at the beginning of a season to over 200 if supers (additional structures) are added. That additional weight is the profit for a beekeeper, and it comes in a sweet package, locally produced honey.
“It’s been a hard year, not much production,” Mike said. “We have 5,000 supers right now.”
Hives are familiar sights across Fremont County. You’ll see the white, wooden structures set below trees, on open bluffs, or in the middle of farm fields.
Bees thrive on blooming plants, and blooming plants need bees for pollination. It’s a dance that Mother Nature has orchestrated since the first flowering plants appeared millions of years ago.
“We have 2,500 hives this year,” Mike said.
Half of their annual cycle of honey production and maintenance takes place in Northern California. They’ve had partners in California beekeepers over the years including Brian Hartman and Buzz Landon.
“We used to keep bees year-round,” Gale said. “We’d lose a lot of them if the winter was especially bad.”
Bees are amazing creatures. They can regulate the temperature of a hive by generating body heat in cold conditions or cool the hive with the collective breeze created by thousands of tiny beating wings creating a breeze within the hive.
That ability works well in summer almost anywhere, but in winter, especially the subzero winters that frequent Fremont County, they can’t generate enough heat for prolonged periods.
“We covered them with straw, banked dirt against them, but even that didn’t work all the time,” Gale said.
The game changed for Ibach Honey in the mid-1990s.
“About 30 years ago we started taking the hives to Oroville and Paradise, California,” Mike said. “It really hit in the late 1990s.”
The towns are in Butte County, part of the Central Valley, one of the richest agricultural areas on earth.
Ibach bees make the trek to the Central Valley each fall and in the spring. They are key players in pollinating some of the highest-production olive and almond orchards on earth.
The image of a beekeeper is a person who opens hives in the late spring, allows the bees to do their business then harvests the honey in the autumn, before locking up the hives for the winter. That may have once been the case on small farms from the 17th to the early 20th century, but today, it’s a year-round operation, with few breaks in the action.
“In normal years, we have a 25 percent loss. With 2,000 hives, you’ve got to make up 500 lost hives,” Mike said. “The whole goal is to keep the hives up.”
Bees travel up to five miles one way to find flowers, returning loaded with pollen and nectar. Mechanized, modern beekeeping has increased the migration of bees inside their hives to thousands of miles a year.
After spending the winter in Butte County, the bees return from California in April.
“We’ll shake the dead stuff, then usually six trucks arrive with 2400 to 2500 hives,” Mike said. “They come back to big holding yards.”
The bees leave the yard with 96 hives on a stake bed truck.
“We leave at 5 am for two days. You can move all of them in two days,” Mike said. “We them into our regular yards.”
Every three days a truckload arrives until around May 20. Before they leave California, they’re treated two or three times for mites. Mites are the largest threat to honeybees and can easily move from hive to hive.
“We do a queen check, then treat them with twice for mites after they arrive,” Mike said. “Mites are the biggest problem.”
In a natural setting, bees survive the winter and in times of low blooms on the honey they produce. Honey is the marketable product bees produce so bee farmers once walked a survival tightrope with their hives. If you took too much honey, the bees wouldn’t survive the winter, and if you took too few, your business might not survive.
The solution was feeding sucrose syrup to the bees in their hives. The Ibachs have a 6,000-gallon tank of syrup behind their production facility. The syrup comes from Pepsi in Worland and is the same ingredient you’ll find in soft-drink machines.
“We used to buy it in totes,” Mike said. “Now we go through two or more tank loads a season at $20,000 a tank.”
In the beginning of the season, they’ll feed two or three gallons per hive unless there is a good dandelion flow.
Mite treatments, feeding, checking for queens, and hive maintenance with the target of keeping the numbers up until May arrived filled the day for Mike, Gale, and John.
May, and the arrival of summer hopefully kick the bees into high-speed production with dandelions, alfalfa blooms, flowers, and fruit tree blossoms keeping the workers active.
“We throw some supers on them, to get more production,” Mike said.
A single super can hold 40 to 60 pounds of honey, each hive has two, and some of the more productive ones, three supers.
They have 40 hives at a location. Eventually filling 55-gallon drums of honey after extraction. Honey weighs 12 pounds per gallon, so a single drum tips the scales at over 650 pounds.
“Honey flow usually ends in August or the first week in September depending on temperature,” Mike said. “The California guys come in September pulling everything.”
With the automated, pneumatic extraction line in action, crews can extract 400 supers a day, up to 12 tons of honey.
“We’re running 10 to 12 barrels a day, sometimes maybe more when things are cooking and going,” Mike said.
The California crew stays on site for about two weeks, then leaves soon after Labor Day.
“We’ll spend another two or three weeks extracting then we’ll ship, stack and clean up,” Mike said.
In October, the hives get another mite treatment. Head to the holding yards then ship back to Oroville in early November.
“We take 1500, three-pound packages of bees to Spokane, enough to start half,” Mike said. “Either you’re making splits, nucs (nucleus colonies/splits) or packages.”
After a hectic 10 months, they take November and December off.
“I’ll run off to see my son Devin in January in Arizona, then slip up to Oroville,” Mike said.
Hives used to be stacked and stored outside, but now they’re stacked 12 to 15 pallets high with live bees in climate-controlled buildings.
“We keep the temperature about 42 to 43 degrees,” Mike said. “The bees are in a dormant state, the queen not laying.”
They stay that way for five or six weeks. This is a good method of mite control, since in a holding yard, they’re too close to other bees and can get infected all over again.
Ibach’s and other producers use commercial brands of chemicals for mite control.
As the new year arrives, the bees are taken to almond orchards to do their pollinating magic for five to seven weeks.
“They bring in a lot of nectar,” Mike said. “When those almonds bloom, it will knock you over with smell, it’s wonderful.
Almond orchards are ablaze with intense, tightly packed blooms, and each one must be pollinated to produce an almond.
“Almond orchards have to have bees,” Mike said. “Pollination has changed the game in bee production.”
Almond and olive growers pay to have the bees arrive and pollinate their crops. It’s a winning solution for both growers and beekeepers.
After the almonds are pollinated, its back to the holding yards for the bees.
Breeding queens is a natural process within bee hives, but it’s a lucrative one as well, with beekeepers working in crews to grow queens that will replace existing ones, or start new hives.
“Buzz Landon starts breeding queens. He starts the process when the temperature gets 55 to 60 degrees,” Mike said. “They graft thousands a day.”
Day-old eggs are placed in queen cups. The queen cells are placed into individual queen nucs, taken to the field with nursing bees, where they make a flight, and then fly back into the box. Queens mate in flight with several drones.
“A crew of eight women catch and mark queens every day, they sell 400-500 queens a day all over the country. It is an amazing thing,” Mike said. “She won’t go into flight until it’s 65 degrees, it’s all based on weather and conditions. Rain kills the process.”
The queen grafting fills up March and April, it’s a constant process until the first of June when it gets too hot to raise a queen.
A queen has a lifespan of about a year. She can lay up to 10,000 eggs.
“We make splits, treat and feed the bees then bring six loads back,” Mike said. “They come back to me, then the process starts over.”
Bees are dormant for six weeks, and active for the remainder of the year.
“Pollination changed my life, the honey flow is off and on, but pollination changed the game,” Mike said. “Nearly everyone in the county goes to California.”
“We used to have 15 percent losses in a good year, 60 percent in a bad one,” Gale said.
In an average year, they can produce 140 to 160 barrels of honey, in an exceptional one, up to 270.
“We have to keep hives at least two miles away from other beekeepers, “Gale said.
At present, they have 50 locations around the county.
“This is a great area, but we’re flooded right now,” Mike said.
Gale agreed, “We’re overtaken with bees,” he said.
Many people are squeamish around bees, treating them like the much more vicious yellow jackets.
“You get stung every day,” Mike said. “If it’s chilly out or they’re angry you can get five a day.”
A bee man’s friend is his smoker, it calms the bees and makes them easier to work with.
“We use burlap in the smoker,” Gale said.
Honey production is highest on hot nights, aided by evaporation inside the hive.
Though it’s a family business, John Martinez is part of the family.
“John has been our right-hand man,” Mike said.
“John has everything ready and, in its place,” Gale said. “I don’t know what we’d do without him.”
Pat works full-time as a teacher but is a big part of the business in the summer.
“Pat is a ton of help,” Mike said.
The grandkids are part of the business and many well-known locals have worked for Ibach Honey over the years including Harold Bailey, Jim Beck, Travis McIntosh, Eric Hackney, Scott Morrow, and Matt Mason.
It’s been a challenging summer with hot dry, drought conditions. Smoke from forest fires make the bees angry and the mites remain a problem. Production is slow this season, but Gale and Mike are optimistic.
“I think it’s in the blood. Pat and I both love it. It’s a great reliever after teaching,” Mike said. “You’re doing something different all the time.”