Sweet new festival coming to W’burg Saturday

This weekend, Williamsburg is getting a sweet new festival.

The inaugural Honey Festival will take place Saturday from 5 – 9 p.m. at the Green Space on Main Street, which is catacorner to the old Whitley County Courthouse.

The event will feature demonstrations by the Whitley County Beekeepers Association in addition to over 45 vendors, who will be selling things, such as honey, wax, honeybuns, T-shirts, jewelry, soaps, food, snow cones among other things.

From 5 – 7 p.m. there will be a live DJ playing country, rock and dance pop.

From 7 – 9 p.m. the band Black Molly will perform a variety of country and rock and roll hits.

Admission is free but you will need to bring your own lawn chair and your wallet as several items will be on sale.

The event is the brainchild of Shale Oak Wine Tasting Owners Greg and Iskra Arenas, who are located at 209 Main Street. They organized it in part to get more foot traffic in downtown Williamsburg.

“We just want to get more people in downtown Williamsburg. We own Shale Oak Wine Tasting room where we do wine tastings. We are going to bring on bourbon in the fall. We need to have reasons for people to come downtown after work and on weekends during the day on Saturdays and stuff,” Greg Arenas said.

“It seems like when they actually did some type of event, whether it be a concert or art in the park or something like that, people would show up. When there is no event, crickets. My wife and I decided after talking to a few friends to let’s do a honey festival. Everybody loves honey.”

Iskra Arenas, who is into homeopathic medicine, initially started trying to find a natural way to treat her husband’s occasional allergies, and found out that taking local honey is good for that type of thing.

She then got in touch with Theresa Martin, who is over the local beekeepers association, Greg Arenas noted.

Planning for the event got off to a slow start. After that Iskra Arenas did some advertising in the newspaper and friends talked to other friends and so forth.

“Then it just exploded. We have almost 50 vendors,” Greg Arenas noted. “We are hoping the turnout will be big. This is our first one. Obviously we will get better as the years progress. Then we will start looking at other festivals and just add more and more so that every weekend there is something to do in downtown Williamsburg.”