Classes at the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center aren’t just for kids. After the center closes for the night on Mondays, through the month of January, a classroom full of adults sits down for a beginner beekeeping course taught by Stuart Woronecki of Stonewall Apiary.

After the first session on Jan. 4 ended at 9:20 p.m., Woronecki admitted that it wasn’t unusual for the class, which runs 6:30 to 9:00 p.m., to end late. But he has been keeping bees for more than 20 years, and there’s a lot of information to cover in just four sessions.

“There’s just so much that you need to know about the life cycle of a bee and how a bee operates, the different castes of bees, in order to know what to do at certain times with your hives,” he told the class.

Overall, he told the class, focus on just keeping the bees alive the first year. Don’t anthropomorphize them because they are just bees and they only live 42 days at the most. Try to think like a bee when handling the hive. And always keep the bee space in mind.

That last point is less philosophy and more construction logistics. Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth, largely regarded as the “father of modern beekeeping,” found in the mid-1800s that if any space in a hive is greater than 3/8”, bees will fill it with beeswax, and spaces smaller than 3/8” will be filled with a sticky red resin called propolis. Langstroth hives, which are the box-shaped hives now standard in beekeeping, were designed with the bee space in mind so Woronecki and other beekeepers can easily remove the frames that the combs form on to check on the bees or harvest honey.

The class at the Nature Center started in 2011 after Woronecki received several requests from customers for tours of his apiary in Hanover to learn the art of beekeeping. The center itself has bees on the Denison Homestead and approved Woronecki’s proposal for a course at the center, with a Saturday morning session in addition to the Monday night session.

He also teaches the course with the Coventry Regional Farmers Market on Wednesday nights. The sessions attract between 75 and 100 people per year, he said.

One of the key parts of Woronecki’s four-part course is the third session, which focuses on pests and disease. He said it’s important to recognize diseases in a colony as soon as possible and try to prevent it before they start because a sick colony is very difficult to save.

“I really am going to try to talk you out of beekeeping [in the third session],” he told the class. “Colony collapse disorder is not something that you have to worry about, but there are plenty of other things that are a problem for beekeepers.” He cited mice and Varroa destructor mites as examples of threats to bees while discussing the design of the Langstroth hives he uses.

Much of his preparation for the class is dedicated to reviewing studies to keep his course materials and students up to date on the latest disease research. He told the class that even though he has a PhD in music theory and teaches as an adjunct at a variety of local colleges, he uses his access to read entomology journals.

The course has made him a better beekeeper because of the research he has had to do, Woronecki said.

The research has also led to a new class on honeybee anatomy for high school students. He piloted the class at Avon Old Farms School Jan. 5.

Michelle Mokrzewski, a STEM teacher at West Side Middle School in Groton, joined the class with health teacher Sue Ljungberg to learn how to keep bees as part of a program with the school. She originally got the idea from the Savannah Bee Company, which gives grants to install hives in schools through its Bee Cause Project, and she was excited to see a class locally to learn how to raise bees herself.

Mokrzewski said her seventh- and eighth-grade students are very interested in the ongoing colony collapse that honeybees are suffering from because of their role in agriculture, and they often bring in news articles about recent research on colony collapse. In order to fully understand and investigate the causes of collapse, they need to first know how bees live, which is where a hive in the school courtyard would come in.

“The kids are really excited about it,” Mokrzewski said. After establishing a hive at West Side Middle, she wants to expand the program into the high school to give the students more opportunities to investigate.

Once the Nature Center session covers the equipment, bee biology, and disease management, the final class is an opportunity to wrap up the course, including questions the students may have asked along the way. Some students take the course a second time after they have interacted with the equipment because Woronecki can’t bring the hives into the course in the middle of January to demonstrate a concept.

Instead, he offers “field days” in April for students to visit some of his hives, which are located throughout eastern Connecticut including Connecticut College, Coogan Farm in Mystic and Groton Family Farm.

a.hutchinson@theday.com

Twitter: @ahutch411