CALIFORNIA HONEY FESTIVAL IS SATURDAY
The California Honey Festival will return to downtown Woodland for its fifth year this Saturday.
A celebration of bees as the lead pollinators, the free festival is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and is set to include live music, over 110 different vendors including several dedicated to local honey, cooking demonstrations, a kid zone and a honey lab.
Al Eby, founder and director of the California Honey Festival, said that he had always wanted to create a signature festival that was celebratory of Woodland’s identity as an “ag town.”
“We’re an ag town and you know, it’s really how Woodland got its start and it’s so important to embrace that,” Eby emphasized. “Bees and pollination are just the perfect fit because of the agriculture aspect of what Woodland and Yolo County does.”
Eby credits John Foster, beekeeper and owner of BZ Bee Pollination, as instrumental in the festival’s creation.
“If I had not met him and had not been asked to take macro photos of his bees for him and go out and visit the operation and see the hives and bees, I wouldn’t know the issues that he was facing as a beekeeper and just in California and the United States,” Eby said.
Eby said hearing about the issues served as a driving force for him to try to figure out a way to spread more awareness and education about the importance of bees and pollinators and how humans can do better by planting necessary plants and maintaining hives.
Eby was soon able to bring UC Davis on board to help elevate the event. The Honey Lab, located at the UC Davis booth and hosted by the Robert Mondavi Institute’s Honey and Pollination Center, allows visitors to taste honey from around the country while also learning about how honey is made, the life cycle of a bee, what human actions are threatening to bees and the different kinds of hives.
“I want it to be about education,” Eby stressed. “I want it to be about presentations. I want it to be really good, higher quality vendors.”
Aside from spreading awareness about pollination education, the California Honey Festival has become such a staple in the Woodland community it has had effects that even Eby couldn’t have predicted.
“We had somebody, I think in the first or second year, that came here and loved the town and bought a house because of the festival,” Eby said. “That’s amazing. I mean, I didn’t start out the festival to sell a house, but it’s just amazing to hear that they came here and loved the town and loved what we are doing.”
Visitors can also look forward to some fun new educational aspects and activities “that have never been done before,” Eby teased.
Eby made sure to also shout out the many sponsors, his team at Visit Woodland and the Woodland Hoteliers Group, who provided the seed money to make the festival possible.
“This community really stepped up,” Eby said. “When I say that, you have business owners and businesses here who financially contributed to making the second year even better and then the third year and then the fourth year and then here we’re going on our fifth year. That in itself is really what Woodland is about. Community and supporting events like this.”
For more information about the California Honey Festival, visit their website at https://californiahoneyfestival.com/.