Due to this, we have wrestled with the decision of whether or not to hold a festival this large in 2021. This festival takes months of work from a 20+ member team, of City Staff and dedicated Citizens, and over 100 people on the day of the event to create a successful Honey Bee 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. 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.
We have built a very positive Festival that has grown larger and more successful each year. 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. 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. We look forward to planning the 2022 Honeybee Festival, and we already have some great ideas to bring it back on June 4, 2022.