The Honeybee Centre will be buzzing like a beehive on July 15 and 16, as the centre hosts its 11th annual Honeybee Festival, a yearly celebration of bee education and family fun.
“The main thing is to help spread awareness about bees and the importance of bees,” Andrew Delbaere, the Honeybee Centre’s marketing coordinator, said. “So we built the festival around that.”
The main attraction of the weekend is the beekeeping presentations and the bee beards. The Honeybee Centre’s beekeepers will be showing how they go into a hive, demonstrating the different parts of a hive and colony.
They’ll also be giving an extraction demonstration, showing how the centre gets the honey from the hive.
But those educational demonstrations aren’t the only things happening at the festival, which takes place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. There will be artisan vendors and food trucks, as well as face painting, balloon animals, a bouncy castle and a barbecue.
In the past, around 3,000 to 5,000 attended the event over the weekend. Delbaere expects that many to return this year if the weather this weekend is good.