Sluggo said:

I've got a bee question. A friend of mine was driving across the country to buy boxes of bees. He said they had thousands of bees per box all packed up. Is that normal?

Very common. That's called a package. It's a shoe-box sixed wooden box with screened sides. They're almost always 3 lbs of bees (10-12 thousand), a can of syrup for them to eat, and a queen in a very small queen cage with a few nurse bees. It's how a great many new hives are started.

You dump the bees in a new hive, pour what little syrup may be left into a feeder, and place the queen cage inside. The queen cage has a marshmallow plug to keep her in for a few days until the bees accept her. If you put her right in, they'd kill her. It takes about four days for the bees to eat the plug away and release her. When they do, she enters the hive as their queen and they go about the business of drawing out comb and making honey, while she lays eggs. I'll try to find a picture of a package.

*edit*

I'll go one better. Here is a picture of one of my hives from a few years ago. I started it with a package. You can see the queen cage laying in front of it.

*edit*

Here is that same hive earlier this year. It's grown considerably.

Like all hives, it started as a single Deep (brood, stored pollen, and honey). These days it's two deeps and three Supers (honey only). In the picture there were only two supers. I added a third super about 4 months ago. I'll be extracting later this month. One super only, they get the rest for the winter.