Tom Theobald's beehives get a clean up

On Tuesday evening, June 13, and again on Wednesday, June 14, a group of board members from the Boulder County Beekeepers' Association (BCBA) participated in a beehive clean-up in remembrance of Niwot beekeeper Tom Theobald, who passed away in November 2021. Dawn Server, co-owner of Meadow Lake Honey, organized the event, recruiting volunteers to clean up Theobald's apiary off Monarch Road.

John Stobbelaar, a Marine veteran who owns the property on Monarch Road where the beehives are located, recently broke his hip. Stobbelaar considers the apiary a memorial to Theobald, his longtime friend, but he is no longer able to maintain it in what he considers a respectable condition.

According to another of Theobald's closest friends, Miles McGaughey, Stobbelaar did not want anything moved or anything removed from the beehive yard. He wanted to leave the beehives as Theobald left them, as a tribute to his friend, and McGaughey agreed. "Over the years," McGaughey said, "there were animals scratching on them and wind blowing on them and weeds getting overgrown. And the beehives just needed a beekeeper for a little while. Even without bees in there you need a beekeeper around if you have beehives, to keep them together. We just cleaned basically and weeded everything around there, straightened everything up."

"The Monarch Road property was Theobald's home yard," McGaughey said. "It was close to his house. And there was a bear that came by there about every year around Fourth of July we called Uncle Sam. That was a very, very productive bee yard back in the day. They produced a lot of honey right there."

Like Stobbelaar, McGaughey felt that in honor of Theobald, the beehives should be left in their natural state. "I didn't want to paint these things. I didn't want to throw a lot of stuff away," McGuaghey said. "I wanted to clean it and straighten it and cut it. But I wanted to leave some empty boxes laying there, where they always were. He actually used those. He'd set one of those up and find the queen and set her inside there, and cover her so she was alone in that box, so he didn't have to worry about bumping her while he was doing something else. And so those empties had a purpose."

Theobald, a long-time resident of Niwot, was nationally known for his work fighting the use of neonicotinoid pesticides and was the founder of BCBA. He was a renowned expert on pesticide issues who, according to McGaughey, fought the EPA for dereliction of duties and due process, and won. Over the years the two men became close friends and often traveled together on road trips, going cross country for bees.

"When I got into beekeeping," McGaughey said, "there was no internet or cell phones and if you were interested, you found books. You went to the library. And in Longmont there was a little pocket in the front of every book, and it had a little check-out card, and you had to sign the card and they stamped it with the date. So, you can see who had had that book out, and when. You could see everybody who'd had that book out. Well every bee book in Boulder County I came to in the library had Tom Theobald ... He was pretty much the only guy and the last guy to check out 25 or 30 books on beekeeping. And I started saying, 'Who is this guy, Tom Theobald?'

"A friend of my mom's read 'The Fence Post' magazine--the rural kind of farming, ranching magazine here. And she said, 'I believe that guy writes for 'The Fence Post,'' and dug out an old copy and showed it to me. And I started reading him and following him that way, and when I had questions in my beekeeping operation, I would go and ask him questions. And we became really good friends."

The beehives have one unusual feature. Many were made from the printing sheets from the printing press at the Times-Call. "Ed Lehman, who was a good friend of beekeepers back in the day, used to give those away and we would go and take those," McGaughey said. The big sheets of aluminum were perfect for rain proofing a beehive. "And so, every one of those, when you look in there, there is a negative of the Times-Call."

According to Server, all the BCBA board members planned to participate in the clean up, however the first recruits arrived as soon as the rain stopped on Tuesday evening and finished the work within 24 hours, before any others had the time to provide support. Members of the clean-up crew included Miles and Rosa McGaughey, Dawn Server, Alex Vargas, and Claire DeLeo.