WILTON – Just a few days after the town’s annual Blueberry Festival a local blueberry farm has suspended its picking season.

A lack of wild bees may be to blame.

The Wilton Blueberry Farm has put picking on hold because there are no berries to pick, the farms’ owners, Jan Collins and Irv Faunce, said in a release issued Tuesday.

“The blueberries simply are not there,” they said in a prepared statement. “The wild bees that pollinate the plants simply didn’t appear in great enough numbers this year and we think that is the cause of the scarcity of blueberries.”

Wild bees navigate by the sun, and rainy dark weather in late May hampered their work. But, even on sunny days, there were fewer bees than in past years, the release stated.

The farm opened Aug. 1, but “picking rapidly depleted available berries,” Collins and Faunce said. “We are assessing whether the crop is lost for this year, and will keep our customers informed.”

The farm will update it’s phone message if it is able to reopen for picking, but the crop would be limited, Collins said via phone Wednesday. Last year, they harvested more than 20,000 pounds of berries; this year they were looking at between 10 and 20 percent of that.

“This place has been open for a couple of decades and people around here kind of consider it their farm,” Collins said. “So it is very disappointing for them when we don’t have berries or we don’t have enough berries. We will have some limited berries, but nowhere near the number of berries we would need to fulfill the need of the community.”

Ned Porter, Maine’s deputy commissioner for agriculture, said that U.S. Department of Agriculture projections for the state’s wild blueberry harvest were slightly lower than last year but higher than the five-year average.

In all, an estimated 66 million pounds of wild blueberries will be harvested this year, Porter said. Maine produces 98 percent of all wild blueberries in the U.S., according to a USDA Web site.

The cost of renting honey bees, which wild blueberry growers need, increased this year Porter said. But more bees than ever before were brought into the state by commercial farmers, the state’s apiarist, Tony Jadczak, said. He said some hives came from as far away as Bakersfield, Calif.

Jadczak said most blueberry farmers no longer depend only on wild honey bees to pollinate their crops because diseases have wiped out most of the wild honey bee populations in the U.S.

“This has been an ongoing issue for about two decades now,” Jadczak said, “but we’ve seen it coming.”

More than 65,000 hives were rented to blueberry farmers in Maine this year, most going to the state’s big blueberry producing farms in Washington County, Jadczak said.

That compares to only 9,000 hives in 1983, he said. Slowly, farmers have recognized the need to rent bees to guarantee a good crop, he said.

“For each colony of 1,000 bees they put per acre they can expect an increase in production of about 1,500 pounds of berries,” Jadczak said.