Werner’s Trading Company gets its share of customers, so it’s not uncommon for a short line to form at the cash register from time to time.

But once a year, people from Cullman and out of town alike show up at Werner’s and happily wait their turn for something out of the ordinary: bees, tens of thousands of them, which arrive in a single annual shipment in time for beekeepers to get them settled and into the fields ahead of spring.

Werner’s handed out 140 hives to customers Friday, completing an order cycle that, for most, originated months ago. If you’re going to have bees, it takes a little planning, store owner Rob Werner explained.

“I had to place the order back in November to get them,” he said. “I don’t take orders here until January. We have to drive about six hours from here, to south Georgia, to pick them up.”

Bee hives aren’t available on every corner store, which is why Hartselle-area resident Charles Driver made the trip to Cullman Friday to pick up his.

“There’s nobody else who’s got them where I am,” said Driver, a retiree who owns a small Morgan County farm. “I could order them, but I did that last year, and the night after I put the bees out, those son of a guns just flew away and left.”

Driver has operated as many as 30 hives at once in the past, but he’s only trying for two hives this year. It’s a labor of love; not profit. “It’s a losing proposition,” he laughed. “I’m not the only one who’s lost hives — everybody I know who’s doing it has lost hives. If I were doing it for the money, I’d forget about it.”

Werner said customers come from as far away as Huntsville, Birmingham, and even points south to snag their hives. Each contains between 12,000 and 14,000 bees.

With this year’s fresh shipment of hives stacked nearly head-high and buzzing in the store’s loading area, Werner already had done the quick math. “There’s around 1,800,000 bees back there,” he said.