Our longest blueberry season – ever, has ended. What a year 2019 has been for Georgia blueberries at RabbitEye Farm! Spring daytime temperatures got warm very early and nighttime temps stayed cool – luckily without a hard frost. Rain and sunshine were just about perfect. That’s the beginning of a good blueberry season recipe.
July 4th and 5th, we were open all day, for our final pick days still with a good amount of berries on hand. It was humid, hot, and also rained a bit – which is normal (although unpopular) Georgia summer weather.
As the years have progressed, its been so nice to see repeat customers and meet new folks who love healthy and nutritious blueberries. Below are some photos of folks who gave the season a wonderful send-off. They came out to pick despite the weather. Everyone looked like they had fun. Thank you to all who came out to get “Last Chance” blueberries at our farm.
Slide-show of Final-day blueberry enthusiasts.
No time to rest, yet
Berry picking season may have ended, but we didn’t have any time to waste. Sunday we had to pull honey. The spinning equipment was ready and the weather was sunny and dry. Pulling honey is another term for harvesting honey and is not an easy job. It requires gathering everything you will need, which in itself, can take a good hour, getting all the bees safely out of a honey super and taking it off the hive. The frames have to be checked to make sure the honey is ripe, or capped. If it is not capped, that means the water content may be too high in those cells, so it probably can’t be spun. Decisions need to be made and usually it is put back in the hive.
Repeat, repeat, repeat
Repeat this process for all frames in all the supers, on all the hives. Put the ones to spin on the truck and re-configure the hive back together with the correct number of frames. The boxes on the truck have to be kept sealed constantly, or the bees will get right back in them. Pulling honey is labor intensive, the weather is always hot, supers are heavy, bees and people can get irritated. This is a long slow process, just to take it off the hive, uncap each frame, and spin it. After that, it takes another two days because it has to settle and get filtered once more before it goes into the jars. I’m not even counting all the clean-up work required for containers, spinning equipment, tools, and hive components.
Our bee-yard is still in a rebuilding stage since we lost so many hives a few years back, but we were pleased with the 2019 honey production. Every hive is not equal as far as ability, but luckily, we had some over-achievers to make up for the smaller hives. It looks like we will only take honey once a year for the foreseeable future – for several reasons, but mainly climate change.