There was a lot of buzzing going on in Cary Therriault’s garage last April 20.

About 60 honeybee hobbyists dropped by his Bellevue home to pick up their packages of bees — containing 1.5 million bees altogether.

“It shows the strength of the local beekeeping community,” said Therriault, who brokered a group purchase of 150 packages of honeybees for the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association.

Each three-pound, $65 wooden box contained 10,000 honey bees of the Italian and Carnolian variety. Inside each box was a can of sugar water for the bees to eat and a smaller wooden box containing the coveted queen bee.

Every spring for the past six years, Therriault has looked forward to the honeybees arrival, which are delivered from California. The hum the bees make when they are all together and the heat they give off is worth waiting for, he said.

Throughout the afternoon, hobbyists from around the Puget Sound came to pick up their boxes of bees.

People will use them for a variety of purposes, said Richard Sirota, president of the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association, which promotes the interest of beekeeping to protect honeybees and educate beekeepers.

“People can get propolis, which is a substance on a beehive that is sort of like tar,” he explained. “Honeybees use it to seal the edges of the hive and that material is used medicinally.”

Other products that come out of raising bees include royal jelly and bee pollen.

Bellevue resident Kelly Louvier does it for business. That afternoon, she came to pick up nine boxes of honeybees that she will use for pollination services. She has used them to pollinate the city of Bellevue’s blueberry fields, as well as residences and farms in Issaquah and Snoqualmie Valley.

But mostly, people raise honeybees for the honey – and for fun, Sirota said.

“I like honey, it’s that easy,” said Kirkland resident Jason Nelson when asked why he raises honeybees.

When Nelson gets his three boxes of bees home, he pours them into a hive in his backyard, he said. Once the hive is full-grown, he hauls it to the mountains where he hopes the bees will produce fireweed honey.

Beside the sweet taste of honey, Nelson also likes the smell of the bees themselves.

“They smell like lemon grass,” he said, putting his nose to the metal screen on one of the boxes. “If you shake them and get them upset, you’ll be able to smell them a lot better. When you do that, they’re not out to get you, they are just what’s called ‘let’s get back together.’ The way they do that is with that smell.”

Therriault, whose father had honeybees when he was a child, said he has fond memories of “lazy days and just watching them.”

“I would lay in front of the hives watching them take off,” he recalled. “They looked like missiles.”

He would capture the drones – the male bees that don’t have stingers – which are easier to recognize because they are larger. He would also watch his dad extract honey from the honeycomb and grab gooey handfuls.

Now, Therriault, who owns Cascade Natural Honey Company, enjoys going through the process himself. Standing in the back of his garage, he pointed out his jars of honey — from the light-colored and Northwest signature blackberry honey to the darker knotweed variety, and finally to his favorite, alfalfa honey.

“When you heat up the honey, you’re cutting wax and honey off from the frame,” he said of the process. “It’s a beautiful smell.”

Contact Carrie Wood at cwood@reporternewspapers.com.