Greater Hot Springs Beekeepers

06/06/2026

💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵

05/28/2026

Meeting tonight at 7 pm. Topic is collecting honey! Bee there.

05/28/2026

With summer on its way, here’s a great honey ice tea recipe to have in your back pocket. ☀️⛱️
From “Kate’s Honey Iced Tea” Recipe:
- 1 or 2 fruity tea bags
- 1 black, green, or mint tea bag
- 1 quart boiling water
- 2 tablespoons lemon juice
- 2 pinches of sea salt
- 1/4 cup honey of your choice
Combine all ingredients, pour in the boiling water, and let sit for 15 mins. After, fill the remainder of the container with cold water and put in the fridge until cooled. Add a garnish of your choice and enjoy!

~ Queen Delanie

05/24/2026

The provided infographic details the intense, cooperative process required for beeswax production inside a honeybee colony.🐝 Individual Bee ProductionWorker bees aged 12 to 18 days old produce wax from specialized abdominal glands.Liquid wax is exuded and solidifies upon contact with the air into translucent scales.A single healthy worker bee can produce approximately 8 wax flakes in a 12-hour period.🧱 Scale of Honeycomb ConstructionTo create just 1 pound of honeycomb, a colony must produce roughly 500,000 wax flakes.Building comb requires an enormous energy investment; the colony must consume between 6 to 8 pounds of honey to produce just 1 pound of wax.Builder bees scrape these flakes using spines on their legs, move them to their mouthparts, and chew them with saliva enzymes to make the wax soft and pliable for shaping hexagonal cells. Just remember bees wax is like gold. If you can save your wax for the next year in a comb form your honey production will go up.

05/22/2026

If you expect bees to willingly accept a bare piece of industrially molded plastic just because it fits perfectly into your hive, you are setting yourself up for an expensive lesson in colony psychology.

The truth is that plastic frames fresh from the factory often retain a chemical manufacturing odor that acts as an immediate deterrent to a colony (long story short, it stinks).

If that industrial smell is too strong, the bees will outrightly reject the plastic frames, leaving them untouched or building erratic wild comb right next to them out of sheer protest.

Immediately after purchasing these types of frames, make sure to let them "breathe" for at least 2 weeks.

Spread them on a large indoor, highly ventilated room and leave them there for a while.

But that's not enough.

You'll also have to try to make the foundation appealing by heavily coating the surface with clean, melted wax.

I believe that the thickness of this wax layer is the critical detail that determines whether the bees draw out straight, flawless cells or completely ignore the frame.

But make sure to do it in a way to not "straighten" the frame entirely, but to keep the honeycomb mold intact.

I strongly think that shortcuts during this waxing process are the primary reason many traditional beekeepers claim that plastic frames do not work.

They work, and they work well (for some beekeepers at least).

They have other problems in my opinion, but building upon them is not one of them.

Thank you for reading 📖
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic 🧡
Please leave a like if you've found this interesting 🐝

Happy beekeeping and full barrels 🐝🍯

05/22/2026

05/22/2026

Let's talk about the core reasons why your bees decide to leave you and swarm away.

Bees abscond for very specific reasons, and most of them are connected to survival pressure inside the colony itself.

You should understand something important.

Leaving the hive is extremely expensive biologically.

The hard truth is that bees are usually leaving their cozy homes mainly because of their keeper.

Since this topic is huge, today I'll be talking only about overheating.

A hive exposed to brutal direct sunlight with poor ventilation can slowly become unbearable, especially in extremely hot climates.

The colony starts losing control of internal temperature regulation and eventually decides relocation is safer and cheaper than continuing the fight against heat stress.

This becomes even worse in overcrowded colonies during heavy nectar flows (too many bees, too much humidity, too little airflow).

Overheating is essentially turning your hive into a slow cooker :), so why should they stay? Would you stay in these conditions?

To halt this disaster before the colony absconds, you must proactively adapt your equipment to the environment rather than waiting for the bees to quit.

Using screened bottom boards, adding some grass on top of the hives, creating upper ventilation gaps, and painting your hive bodies a reflective white are the foundational steps to breaking the heat trap.

If your yard is trapped in a concrete sun trap or a dead-air zone behind a solid fence, you need to install artificial shade sails or physically move the stands under a tree canopy.

When the temperature inside the box mimics an oven, the queen stops laying, the wax begins to soften, and the colony's survival instinct overrides their attachment to the combs.

You should never let your apiary reach the point where the bees are forced to cluster on the outside of the hive just to breathe.

Take control of the microclimate inside your hives, or prepare to watch your investment fly over the horizon :).

Thank you for reading 📖
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic 🧡
Please leave a like if you've found this interesting 🐝

Happy beekeeping and full barrels 🐝🍯

05/15/2026

Atwoods has a good deal on beekeeping supplies if anyone is interested.