A salute to tiny-winged heroes is upon us once again as the annual North Carolina Honey Festival in Whiteville takes over downtown on Saturday, Sept. 10, beginning at 10 a.m. to celebrate National Honey Month.
The mission of the North Carolina Honey Festival is to highlight the significance of bees in the environment, celebrate honey and honey products, encourage bee-friendly practices, and promote beekeeping in all of North Carolina’s regions.
Vendors and product exhibitors will be set up with a variety bee-related items, ranging from raw local honey to beeswax candles, meads, skincare and hair products, bee pollen, honey-sweetened sauces and desserts.
Whiteville was selected to host the festival as an official ‘bee city’, because of its growing beekeeping community.
Food trucks, community groups, and the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences will be set up, and the fun doesn’t end until 3 p.m.
Honeybees and other pollinators are essential to the environment. Between 75 and 95 percent of all flowering plants on the earth need help with pollination. Pollinators provide services to over 180,000 different plant species and more than 1,200 crops. That means that one out of every three bites of food required pollination at some stage of growth.
Tanya Hiltz, beekeeper at Lake Waccamaw, says that bees will spend their entire life making honey. “Bees in the summer only live for two to four weeks. They work and collect honey to store for a winter they will not see.” She says one of her favorite things about bees is how selfless they are.
For more information about the N.C. Honey Festival, visit http://nchoneyfestival.com.
