A local school was abuzz on Tuesday, July 18, during a honey of a summer camp.

The first Butler Catholic School Summer Garden Camp is being held for three weeks at the school off Locust Street in Butler, where students don their camp T-shirts and spend their Mondays through Thursdays learning about gardening.

The theme for last week’s camp was pollinators, and on Tuesday, campers learned about the role of honeybees in the all-important natural process that ends in the availability of healthy food.

Josh Wissinger, a Butler Catholic School alumni parent, brought an observation hive to the school that allowed students to view the bees’ activities inside the sealed enclosure.

Wissinger, who has been a beekeeper for nine years, keeps the Butler Catholic bees at his house until they are needed to pollinate the vegetable gardens, flowers, fruit trees and native perennials in a strip of land on the east side of the school property.

Wissinger loaded the thousands of bees into the wood-and-plexiglas observation box by placing it on top of one of his hives.

When the queen climbs in, her loyal subjects stream in as well and continue their incessant work to make her life comfortable as they instinctively begin creating and maintaining the temporary hive.

Wissinger explained to the fascinated campers that each hive has one queen whose sole job is to lay eggs in the cells of the honeycomb built by her worker bees.

The queen lays about 2,000 eggs per day, and if she dies, the female bees provide her larvae with a secretion known as “royal jelly.”

The amount of royal jelly the bees give each larva determines whether they will be a drone, or a male bee whose sole job is to mate with the queen; a worker bee; or the hive’s next queen bee.

“The larva that receives the most royal jelly will become queen,” Wissinger said.

The female worker bees in the hive live 50 days, and spend that time secreting the wax to build the honeycomb, cleaning the honeycomb after they build it, removing dead bees, preparing for the queen to lay eggs, and gathering pollen and nectar to produce honey and “bee bread,” or food for the hive’s baby bees.

In the winter, Wissinger explained, the worker bees kill the drones so the colony will have fewer mouths to feed. The bees huddle in a ball and eat honey to stay warm, with their queen in the middle.

No matter how low the mercury drops, the clutch of honeybees remains at 95 degrees.

“They are the most interesting bug on the planet,” Wissinger said.

Natalie Londino, 9, said she was fascinated to learn about and see the worker bees energetically performing their tasks with no instruction.

“The instinct of the worker bees is to just start working,” Natalie said.

She said the camp definitely changed her outlook on honeybees.

“I was always afraid they would sting me if I accidentally got too close, but now I know that won’t happen if you leave them alone,” Natalie said.

Wissinger confirmed that honeybees are not aggressive and will fly around a human they see as a threat to move them away before administering a sting as a last resort.

Unlike other stinging insects, Wissinger said honeybees have barbed stingers that penetrate the flesh and hold on, while a sac of poison pulsates on the skin’s surface to pump the poison into the sting site.

Natalie Gleixner, 8, also said she was more wary of honeybees before joining the camp.

“If I saw one now, I would just leave it alone, to be honest,” she said.

She found one other fact about honeybee colonies interesting.

“The boy bees don’t really do that much, but all the other bees in the hive have a lot of big jobs,” Natalie said.

Wissinger used a special machine to help the campers spin honey into delicious treats, after learning about the bee colony. Each camper received a small jar of honey to take home.

The campers also made beeswax lip balm Tuesday.

Kathy Dudley, director of development at Butler Catholic School, initiated Garden Camp and leads each day’s activities.

She said campers on Monday built “insect hotels,” which resemble tiny, three-sided wooden homes with four rooms.

Campers outfitted each little room with a different nesting material to attract different kinds of pollinators, Dudley said.

“It’s to aid all types of beneficial bugs and give them a home in the garden,” she said.

The insect hotels will hang in locations throughout the garden space, and campers also get to take one home, Dudley said.

She hopes to continue holding Garden Camp each year at Butler Catholic School.

“I want kids to be aware of how our food is grown and know they can actually grow their own food at home,” Dudley said. “I want them to be excited about the outdoors and activities like gardening, which is something they can pursue for their whole lives.”