The Red Barn Farm and Gardens
business west of Palisade is closed for the season now.
As
of last weekend Tarrin George Miller, the owner and manager, had used social
media to inform customers that Friday was the final day to purchase the last of
her produce, pumpkins and gourds.
Her
shelves, bins, and boxes were almost empty with her bounty of honey, jams,
cheeses and other items already gone.
Her
day was steady as a few regulars and several tourists stopped to purchase the
best of the remaining produce.
At closing time Tarrin looked
around at her depleted inventory. The shelves were not as completely bare as
they were a few years ago, but it would be short work the next day to pack up
before her final job winterizing the Red Barn.
“I’ll come back late Saturday
afternoon to shut down the bee hive,” she decided.
A honeybee hive in the middle of a
business place?
Why not? The fruit and produce
stand is surrounded by orchards and alfalfa fields where bees are working,
pollinating the plants and crops that keeps the cycle of agriculture going.
Two years ago her finance Levi
built the small acrylic and wooden hive and attached a long acrylic tube along
the interior wall to an outlet hole so the honeybees could come and go about
their business in the surrounding area, but still make honey in the see-through
hive.
Tarrin and her dad Frank George considered
it a good idea and purchased 30,000 Italian honeybees from Chad Ragsdale, a
Grand Valley businessman who deals with bees and hives across the Western
U.S.A.
When Tarrin and Levi married they
took over the Red Barn Farm while Frank moved to Ball Fruit in the Vine Lands
area in Palisade. Levi then built a smaller model of the “see through” beehive for
that business place last year.
In the summer few people fail to
notice the working bee hive. It is placed atop the highest shelves. The honeycombs
take up the majority of space, making a fascinating sideways layering effect.
There are no pullout platforms for the bees to attach their combs, just
building each layer attached to another layer.
The bees are contained at all
times. During the fall with their coming, going, and working, the buzzing is
not loud enough to notice in the fruit stand.
“In the summer we have up to 8,000
bees working the hive, and it can get quite noisy. But now close to cold
weather there are only about 4000 still going in and out.” Tarrin explains. Other
bees are roaming closer to other hives out on the land.
Regular customers who come all
summer have no qualms about the beehive now after two years. Amanda Delgado brought
her three boys to the Red Barn for apples and pumpkins. Like typical boys, they
scampered about, in, around,
through and out the building never looking up for a glimpse of the bees above
their heads.
While their mother and Tarrin
discussed apples and recipes, the boys checked every bin and box for what was
available.
Cy, the oldest at 12, asked
anxiously if Tarrin still had some peppers. His smile faded when she said, “No,
I sold all my peppers yesterday, but you can have a honey stick.”
“Remember the honeybees?” She
pointed to the acrylic box. All three looked up as Tarrin said, “They are still
here. Each kid gets a free honey stick, if you want one.”
Ten year-old Amias and
nine-year-old Josiah were not interested in the bees. They went back to picking
out the right pumpkin while Cy turned away to look in the boxes under the
produce bins. The women’s talk changed from apples to honey.
Tarrin apologized about not having
any honey, but she explained, “We go through a lot in the spring when the bees
first start producing. Any one who comes in, they want that raw honey.”
They sell most of it in the big gallon jars, and it is the
first item to sell out, she said.
Cy comes running across the room with a red bell pepper as
big and bright as his smile. “I found one. I found one.”
Everyone one is now happy with their
apples, pumpkins and decorative gourds. As Mom Amanda pays for the products, she
tells Tarrin that they will see her again next spring when the Red Barn reopens.
Tarrin is too busy to close the
hive on her last business day, but she doesn’t mind cleaning out the hive. She
has done this for three years now.
Her husband Levi might be home from
his oil field job on Saturday, and he will help pack up unsold jars and toss
out the perishable crops that they can’t store or can over the winter.
After they vacuum out the dead bees
and cover the hive to make it warmer through the winter, they will look over
the empty shelves, bins and start making plans for next season.
The honeybees will be a part of
their business because Tarrin will tell anyone who stops and visits, “We are
just the education department of the bees. We tell about how bees are important
to our produce.”
Ask any farmer, they will tell you,
without bees we would not have the apples, pumpkins, almost all crops.
All of that is true, and without
the farmers’ crops, we might not have The Red Barn and other fruit and produce
stands here in the Valley.
