Making Bee Packages in Georgia-VIDEO

 This past week Jerry from Rock Hill Honeybee Farms and I has some extreme windshield time heading down to Patterson, GA to visit bee supplier JJ's Honey.  Jerry distributes about 600 packages nationwide by pickup or shipment, and his stock comes from JJ Honey.
JJ's Honey, owned bay Jerome Jones, is a vertically integrated operation that breeds bees and raises artisanal honey, and raises queens.  Here are a box of queens that are awaiting addition to the packages we are about to pack...only a couple hundred!  These queens were pulled the morning of the package production: 

The drive was 10 hours long.  We did stay at a hotel on the evening we arrived (contrary to Jerry's usual habits) and arrived at the bee farm around 9am.  The weather was cold, around 40, and Jerome expressed his concern about shaking bees at that temperature.  The advice was that we wait until the day got a little warmer, pushing our departure back to DC into late afternoon.  Uuugh.

Jerome had shaked about 75 packages the day before, and Jerry and I took the opportunity with the delay in the day's work to label about 31 packages that he planned to ship for clients around the country.  the process was extremely simple:

• Create an online click-it account as USPS;
• Create/pay for/print individual shipping labels (shipped priority mail, with insurance);
• Staple and tape the label to the package;
• drop off at the local post office for shipping.

The video of our day follows.  We were very surprised at the simplicity of the process, and the importance Jerome placed in the health of his bees, the veracity of his queens, and the generous size (verified by scale) of his packages.  The whole operation was a class act.

Here is the video:


FYI, I hit the bed at 4:30 am about 39 hours after we left Stafford, VA.

Jeff.