DSHS Drip'n Honey Bee Club has its first harvest

DRIPPING SPRINGS — It has been a long year for the Drip’n Honey Bee Club at Dripping Springs High School, but hard work has paid off with the first-ever honey harvest.

The club — made possible thanks to a $5,000 Innovative Teaching Grant and $2,000 from the Texas Honey Bee Education Association, an organization that helps fund programs to educate individuals on bees — was started by Melissa Gold and her students in August 2022 with the idea of learning to recognize the importance of bees.

Gold is entering her fourth year of teaching and her second at DSHS. Teaching ninth through 12th grade, her classes vary from principles of agriculture to small animal management, livestock judging and evaluation and more. She also spends time as a FFA advisor, during which she trains teams for advocating agriculture and hands-on competitions. After already doing so much she “got crazy and decided to add on the bee club.”

The Texas Education Agency has added a curriculum for beekeeping in which students can earn their certification as a bee master, explained Gold. Although DSHS doesn’t have this yet, students can develop enough skills and hours to aid them in starting their own beekeeping business, after getting their certifications, or working for a beekeeper immediately after graduation.

Students participated in every step of the club, explained Gold.

They aided in choosing a logo, a club name, meeting schedules and what they wanted to do.

The club started off with 3,000 bees set up on one of the students' property. Once the bees were set up, the students took trips biweekly to check on them during the summer.

Though bees are self-sufficient in the summer, they require feedings during winter, as there is little for them to feed on, so the students used sugar and nectar materials to nurse them through the colder months.

“[Bees] are pretty self-sustaining. What we do for right now throughout the summer is we go and have students go out in bee suits fully prepared [and] covered,” said Gold. “We go to the hives and see where we’re at as far as building up their comb. Are they producing enough honey? Do we need to remove honey boxes because they’re not producing enough or are they producing too much? Do we need to add boxes for them to build in? They go out there, they look at every single hive and make sure the bees are healthy.”

The first harvest of the club happened only a week ago.

“[The harvest] is definitely a lot of fun. We had about 20 of us, parents included. We have equipment set out in a kitchen setting and we take the comb slats that are inside of these boxes, because we removed the boxes completely away from where the bees are at,” Gold said. We put the slats inside of [a tall container] where they are standing upright. [Then] we turn it on and it allows it to spin and that honey collects on the walls, drains to the bottom, we put it in tubs and once we put them in those tubs, we just transfer them to jars.”

The club is focused on bees, but students learn several skills while participating, such as planning and coordinating, as well as learning about the environment, the wildlife and entrepreneurship.

“[Students] can also turn it into an entrepreneurship and take that bee honey that they’ve harvested and sell it to the public,” said Gold. “We’re trying to get it to where it’s set up in our store here on campus, so they’re able to sell to students and teachers … This is a perfect way on a small scale for them to learn that [if they want their own business someday].”

The students worked throughout the school year to have their first harvest and it seems as though the wait was worth it.

According to Gold, the honey is “phenomenal. It’s absolutely wonderful. It is raw honey … Not one preservative has touched it. It is straight from the beehive. You just can’t beat that taste.”

In the future, Gold hopes to house the bees on school property and expand the club to include the approved curriculum after she achieves other goals.