North Chesterfield – The 7th annual Honey Bee Festival took place on Saturday at the Rockwood Park Nature Center, hosted by the Rockwood Park Backyard Beekeepers.
The intentions of the event, organized by Gene DiSalvo, a member of the Backyard Beekeepers Association, was to promote the experience of being a beekeeper, while generating awareness around the bee and its importance on pollination.
Activities of the event included entertainment for kids, such as storytelling, face painting, and drone petting. For adults, there were speeches of techniques to create a bee-friendly yard and getting started as a backyard beekeeper. There were also food vendors and a sale of local honey.
Kids and adults joined the drone petting stand. Both shared the experience of having contact and petting drone bees, which are docile bees with no stingers, leaving out any risks.
The festival goers went either for the honey and the environmental importance of the bees, because of the opportunity of tasting different types of honey bee and learning more about the importance of bees in the ecosystem. Volunteers also shared the same interests.
“We won’t have food without bees. Bees help our ecosystem naturally sustain itself. We want to keep that going. We’re in tune with nature. It helps our garden. You don’t have pollination without bees. The benefit is the honey,” Hannah Jenkins, of Hopewell, a member of the beekeeper association, said to The Progress-Index.
The relevance of this kind of events lies on emphasizing the importance of bees on the environment. When a hive is detected, it is strongly recommended to contact a beekeeper association so they can remove it and restore it, instead of an exterminator, which would kill the bees and affect pollination process, which is the basis of the cultive and growing process of a lot of different kinds of food.
The Rockwood Park Backyard Beekeepers Association is the organization in charge of Chesterfield County. In case of service needed, contact of the beekeepers association is (804) 404-2331.
Source: The Progress-Index