Beekeeper Josh Wissinger shows the children at the Butler Catholic School's Garden Camp how his bee colony makes honey during the camp’s pollinator week. The campers are, from left, Matthew Dudley, Hudson Kiser, Natalie Londino and Natalie Gleixner. Holly Mead/Special to the Eagle

Holly Mead

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.