Western Bee is national leader in bee keeping equipment

By KYLIE RICHTER

Lake County Leader

Rick Molenda walked through his business, between towers of Ponderosa pine boards, greeting his employees, and stopping to examine a board here and there.

The general manager of Western Bee in Polson is in his eighteenth year as the boss, with many more years as an assistant and mechanic for his dad. 

Last year, Western Bee manufactured 650,000 bee boxes and eight million bee box frames. Western Bee is the largest bee box manufacturer in the country.

Molenda’s father started out in education, then decided he needed a change in 1979. Following an ad in the Great Falls Tribune, he moved his family to Polson and became the general manager, with no experience in the business of bees.

The privately held corporation is part of Dadant, which has been synonymous to bee keeping for over 150 years. According to Molenda, the company came looking for lumber in the early 1960s and settled in Polson without going any further west.

Molenda went away to college while his dad was the manager, and came back with a management information systems degree in the mid 1980s. At that point, bee keeping had declined, and Western Bee had picked up toy making. They produced cobbler’s benches, building blocks and desktops for Playskool. With 150 employees working in shifts around the clock, Western Bee manufactured six million wooden block kits, 180 million blocks and 250,000 desks with a chalk board on one side and a magnetic board on the other. “That really helped us out. We were going nuts and expanded into more buildings. We had this whole block,” Molenda said, pointing to the warehouses across the street.

When Molenda took over for his father in 1998, he developed a website and wrote code for an online store. “We were the first bee company to have a website and an online store,” he said, “With my background, I was able to do that sort of stuff.”

This year, Western Bee is celebrating its 50th anniversary. 

Today they have around 80 employees. They ship bee boxes all over the world, but also also provide locally. According to Molenda, bee keeping picked back up around eight years ago when everyone became worried about the bees disappearing. With more people becoming more knowledgeable about bees, Molenda said he thinks people now realize how important they are. “A certain amount of the food you eat is there because honey bees pollinated something. People are more aware of that now,” he said.

Along with the commercial business of bee keeping, Molenda said the number of people doing it as a hobby has grown over the years. Locally, bee keeping has become more popular. Today, there are even bee clubs around the area. While the business celebrates its 50th birthday, the Molendas have continued to keep it in the family. Rick’s brother Tim is the production manager. 

Molenda was quick to thank his employees. “I have the best crew,” he said. “If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t get it done.”