Sioux Falls festival highlights impact of honey bee shortage

Sioux Falls festival highlights impact of honey bee shortage










SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) - The Honey Bee Festival made its return to Sioux Falls Sunday at the Laurel Ridge Barn. A few hundred attendees enjoyed live music, vendors and learning about all things beekeeping.

The second annual event comes at a critical time. Currently, there is some concern about a shortage of honey bees across the United States. Organizers of the festival said that education, encouragement and a little bit of fun can go a long way to help address that shortage.

Laurel Ridge Event Venue Owner Tyler Childress is relatively new to owning bees. He said his family didn’t quite know what they were doing, but three years ago, they decided to see what all the buzz was about. It’s become a passion of Tyler’s.

“We’re fans of honey bees,” Childress said. “They’re very vital to all of us. We own about 10,000 honey bees ourselves. That’s a relatively small number. For me, it’s very therapeutic to work with bees and such. Honey bees can be very intimidating if you don’t know how to get in. I’m kind of the guy who jumps first and learns after. We jumped, we learned and then we got better each year.”


Since they began keeping bees, they dreamed of hosting a honey bee festival to create community among beekeepers and teach young people about how important bees are to the ecosystem.

“Honey bees are very important,” Childress emphasized. “I consider them to be the foundation, which means if we don’t have honey bees, we don’t have a lot of flowers, a lot of pollination, so it’s kind of God’s way of cross-pollinating and getting things done from a worker’s standpoint.”

Owner of Boernsen Bees in Ocheyedan, Iowa, Marlene Boernsen, put the role of honey bees into perspective.

“A third of our food that we eat needs to have a pollinator to make it grow and be delicious and of that third, eighty percent needs to be honey bees,” Boernsen explained. “I tell kids all the time, pollinators is the most important thing, the honey is just a sweet bonus.”


In 2025, commercial colonies could have losses of up to 70% of the bee population, according to Washington State University entomologists.

Boernsen said a shortage could be due to a number of factors, including pesticide use or habitat loss. She does her part by maintaining her 400 bee colonies and taking time to educate others.

“I need to tell, even farmers, the benefits of sweet clover,” Boernsen said. “That’s a very good honey-producing plant. If everybody just plants more bee-friendly flowers and be careful what they spray their garden with, [it will help].”

Both Childress and Boernsen hope that with the upper Midwest’s focus on agriculture, the region can be a leader in investing in supporting the honey bee population.