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HANOVER TWP. — After driving an hour and a half on an unseasonably cold Saturday morning, Ashley and Stan Breidinger, of Easton, were eager to pick up the 20,000 honeybees they hope will help them grow delicious vegetables and fruit.
“We’re going to have an orchard with apples and plum, peaches and figs,” Stan said as his wife and three young sons stretched their legs and entered Mann Lake Ltd.’s distribution center on Stewart Road in the Hanover Industrial Estates.
Several Saturdays in April are pick-up days here, sales manager Danielle Mislinski said, explaining how people who preordered come to Mann Lake to get their share of some 21 million bees.
These folks aren’t just helping their own backyard gardens or fruit trees, either, Mislinski said.
When beekeepers give the bees a place to live, they benefit the entire environment because the busy little pollinators’ daily task of flying out of their hive to forage for nectar and pollen helps ensure the growth of one-third of the world’s crops and 90 percent of wild plants.
Then there’s that other fringe benefit — the honey the beekeepers collect.
You can put it on your Rice Krispies, Ashley Breidinger reminded 7-year-old Wesson and 5-year-old Bode. You can stir it into your tea.
Despite their mother’s reassuring words, the two older boys hung back a little. Their younger brother, Brenner, 22 months, meanwhile, watched with interest as Mann Lake staffers brought out from the warehouse the bees that will inhabit their families’ hives. The bees filled two boxes, each weighing 3 pounds and containing about 10,000 insects, with a queen bee in a separate compartment.
Bode had once had a bad experience with a hornet nest, their parents said, and that made him and Wesson wary, even when customer service worker Alan Dudeck held a drone bee on his bare hand and showed them how it didn’t hurt him.
“It doesn’t have a stinger,” he said.
A drone’s main purpose is to mate with the queen, who will have many such partners and lay lots of eggs that the worker bees will feed, Mislinski explained.
You can tell who the queen is, Mislinski added, because Mann Lake painted a dot on her body.
The queen bee is about the same size as the other bees at this point, Dudeck said last week. As time goes by, she will get noticeably bigger.
In the beginning, Mislinski said, the Breidingers might expect to collect 20 pounds of honey a year. As the hives become more established, they might collect 100 pounds.
In addition to distributing live bees from California to the East Coast, the Mann Lake Ltd. facility in Hanover Township offers educational seminars and has a retail store where bee-keeping hobbyists can find all sorts of supplies and equipment, ranging from a solar-powered wax melter to long-sleeved gloves, hats with netting and protective suits.
People interested in becoming beekeepers can still order a 3-pound package of bees with a queen ($130) that would be delivered April 23. Or they can order a “5 Frame Nuc” ($150) that includes all life stages from egg and larvae to pupae, adult workers and a queen. That would be delivered in May. For more information, visit the store at 485 Stewart Road, call 800-880-7694 or see mannlakeltd.com.