Honeyfest 2015 - Outtakes and all

-posted by Jayne

Isaac requests a blog about honeyfest, so here it is!  Did you come check it out?  If not, here are some snapshots of what you missed.  Mostly just pictures of our booth, because that's where I was all weekend.  Part of the reason I take so many pictures of our booth and post them here is so I will remember how to set it up next year.  

The booth always looks best on Friday night... everything fresh and clean.  But this year, we got a healthy dose of rain on Friday, which creates havoc for our display.  Cloth table clothes get soaked, meaning the soap that sits on the table cloth also runs the risk of getting wet.

But the rain didn't damper too many spirits.  People still came out to sample our honey and support local beekeepers.

I thought I had done a good job tidying up Friday night before I went home.  I boxed up all the soap and placed it under the table.  This way it would be protected from rain- with a table above, and boxes below so the soap boxes wouldn't get wet. 

This is where that outtakes part comes in...

This is what I found in our tent 1st thing Saturday morning.

Yeah- so I'm not so good at stacking, planning, and fore-seeing potential rain disasters.  As I tried to clean up... it just got worse.  Fresh dry soap falling on wet pavement.  Boxes torn apart from too much moisture.  And all the soap on bottom had already soaked up too much moisture- the wrappers wet and clinging to the wet soap.  Looks like our family will have plenty of soap to use in the coming months!

But you know... this is what I saw when I left my house, driving on my way to honeyfest Saturday morning.  A great reminder that good things will come, even with the rain.

I tucked the wet soap away in our truck and fixed up the remaining soap that wasn't wet back into a nice display.  And all was well.  Saturday morning- the booth was "abuzz" once again with crowds and samplers.  Petyn (pictured below), our usual Saturday morning babysitter, got yanked to Honeyfest so she could handle crowd control.

If you were at the Honeyfest, you may have had a chance to wander over into the Scioto Valley Beekeepers booth.  Dan Williams, former SVB President, and his son Hunter were spinning out fresh honey for an extraction demo.  

Pictured below are the cappings that were scraped off the frames of honey.

These are later cleaned of excess honey, melted down, and used to make beeswax candles, put in soaps, salves, lip balms, etc.

Below is an up-close shot of the extractor.  Frames in motion.

And throughout the weekend, you could catch demonstrations of bee beards.  Even the honey princess did a bee beard!  Pictured below is Arnold Crabtree.  Arnold, also known as "the bee man" helped start many bee clubs throughout Ohio.  He was also the genius with the driving idea behind the 1st Lithopolis Honeyfest.

So another Honeyfest is in the books.  Time to slow down... focus on all the wonderful things happening on the farm.  This past week, I found a beautiful monarch in the yard.  They've been more plentiful this year than in any of the past years I can remember.

The buckwheat is blooming over at my sister-in-law Becky's farm.  She planted this as a cover crop and we were so happy to see it in full bloom, we took a few extra hives over to her location.

Eden's pretty happy about it too.  Happy Fall!