Students conquer their fears in this scary but sweet class

Drew Demko's hands are steady as he grabs a wooden hive frame covered in beeswax, and places it into an awaiting pail at Propel Andrew Street High School in Munhall, Pennsylvania. Using a "hot knife"—beekeeperlingo for a heated brisket knife designed for slicing—he gently cuts away the white wax caps that cover the honey collected on honeycombs. Uncapping, as the process is called, is sticky, messy work. So the floor of the teacher's lounge where Demko and his classmates are working on a recent Thursday is covered in a sheet of blue plastic. Nevertheless, it's a rewarding on-hands learning experience for the 15-year-old high school freshman, who before getting placed in the class "by chance" had only occasionally tasted the sweet and viscous liquid made by bees, and preferred gaming to doing "stuff with his hands.

- Gretchen McKay, Tribune News Service

In addition to learning how to check a beehive for mites and other problems, the Clairton teenager has gained a pretty good understanding of “the stuff beekeepers go through,” he says — if the worker bees are making honey, for example, or if the queen is still laying eggs or the hive has been re-queened. And, no, unlike most students who take the class, he hasn't been stung yet despite being in close contact with what English teacher Brando Keat estimates to be an apiary of more than 200,000 honey bees. (Parents/guardians sign a waiver that warns them participants may be stung and relieves the school of liability.) “I'm not afraid of bees,” Drew declares as he scrapes the honeycombs. There are eight hives on the vacant corner lot on East Ilth Avenue in Munhall. Three of the hives are deemed “mature” by Keat, who started the school's beekeeping program in 2009, almost on a whim. Three more are “nucs,” or small nucleus colonies created from larger colonies. The final two were captured from swarms and transported to new digs alongside the others. Drew might claim to be inexperienced when it comes to working with his hands