Getting your pollinators on...
Elizabeth Schmidt, the assistant manager at North 40 Outfitters in Moses Lake, in the bee aisle. North 40 is now taking orders for three-pound hives of honeybees, which are expected to arrive from California in late April.
Charles H. Featherstone
“Get your honeybees right here!” says a sign at North 40 Outfitters in Moses Lake.
A wooden bee box on sale at North 40 Outfitters in Moses Lake.
MOSES LAKE — Spring is coming. Time to plant bulbs, plan your garden, reseed your lawn if needed, get your lawnmower ready and check out your sprinklers to make sure they work.
And to order honeybees. The pollinators are on-sale at North 40 Outfitters in Moses Lake in three-pound batches for about $160.
That’s about 10,000 honeybees — enough for a small hive.
“We actually have a whole section over here. Not just the bees coming in, but we sell a bunch of stuff that goes along with that,” said Elizabeth Schmidt, assistant manager at North 40 Outfitters.
Schmidt, who just started at North 40 in Moses Lake in January, said she started getting phone calls right after coming to work there from people who wanted to know if the bees were for sale yet.
“There’s people who are loyal, where they’ve been coming in here for as long as we’ve been doing the bees, and they’ll come from Ellensburg and Cle Elum,” Schmidt said. “One day I would get a phone call, ‘Can you order the bees yet?’”
The business can connect beekeepers with all of the accouterments of the trade. Hive boxes, honeycomb frames, gloves and bee suits, smokers, queen excluders and honey extractors to harvest the end product of the work of all those many thousands of honeybees are available as well so that gardens can bloom and flourish.
Schmidt said she also encourages people with allergies to buy locally produced honey. It helped her cope with her allergies, and she believes it can help others.
“It's good for allergies for the spring. Okay, because if you have that local pollen and you're eating it with honey, it's getting your body used to it,” she said.
Honeybees ordered now will arrive at the end of April, Schmidt said, and are only one of the smaller types of “livestock” North 40 sells during the late winter along with chicks and young turkeys to raise for egg laying and Thanksgiving dinner.
All ways homeowners with a little more space can get ready for the coming spring.
However, as of Wednesday, all of North 40’s turkey and chicken tanks were empty.
“We had turkeys in here until a little bit ago,” she said. “But we get them in every week.”
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com
