LaFayette cancels 2021 Honeybee Festival

LaFayette officials, citing public safety concerns and COVID-19’s impact on area businesses, has canceled the 2021 Honeybee Festival.

“Given the uncertainty with the pandemic, vaccine delivery, variants of the virus and also economic uncertainty, we feel it to be wise to wait until 2022 to hold the next Honeybee Festival, despite our wishes,” according to a City of LaFayette news release. “We instead plan to focus our efforts this year on new, smaller community-based events, throughout the rest of 2021, which will provide multiple opportunities to come together, have fun safely and be accomplished with a far less financial burden to the community.”

According to the news release:

The festival’s planning team has been closely monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic since it began and looks forward to holding the next Honeybee Festival as much as anyone. The team has wrestled with the decision of whether to hold a festival this large in 2021.

The festival takes months of work from a team of more than 20 members, city staff, dedicated citizens and more than 100 people on the day of the event to create a successful festival.

“COVID has significantly impacted several of our sponsors, so we had to make a decision early enough to avoid unnecessary spending and unnecessary time investment,” the news release stated. “This festival is very expensive to operate, and we cannot put it on without tens of thousands of dollars of sponsorship to support the quality event, and we did not want to be insensitive to our business sponsors recovering from this past year’s economic constraints.”

The festival has grown larger and more successful each year.

“We look forward to planning the 2022 Honeybee Festival, and we already have some great ideas to bring it back on June 4, 2022,” the news release stated.