For the fourth year in a row, downtown Hilo will be buzzing with activity next weekend in celebration of World Bee Day Hawaii.

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For the fourth year in a row, downtown Hilo will be buzzing with activity next weekend in celebration of World Bee Day Hawaii.

The event, which will take place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday at the Mokupapapa Discovery Center on the corner of Waianuenue and Kamehameha avenues, will feature free community activities and local bee-related vendors.

Susan Collins, a local beekeeper and owner of Bird and Bee Hawaii and the organizer of the event, said it has grown significantly since the first one, thanks in part to grants to help fund it last year and this year.

“The first year, it was just me like, ‘I want to do this event.’ And it was just me basically out of pocket, just paying for everything,” Collins said. “But last year, we had over 1,100 people, and we had vendors, mostly beekeepers and people you know, just small farms and nonprofits that want to support the environment.”

While World Bee Day is an internationally recognized occasion, Collins said she was inspired to localize it in the form of the World Bee Day Hawaii event to raise awareness about the importance of bees on the island.

“I think that people should know that bees are important to our agriculture as well as to our native forests and plants,” she said. “The importance of pollinators is basically what keeps our food system going, and that’s why I wanted to do World Bee Day Hawaii.”

Among the activities attendees can expect this year are free honey tastings, crafts for adults and children, guest speakers, a cooking demo with honey, and various local vendors selling hive-related products.

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“It’s just a party, basically, just for pollinators,” Collins said.

She said that the response to the event from the community has been overwhelmingly positive and that word has spread to the point where she is hearing about it from other people.

“People tell me about World Bee Day. They’ll be like, ‘there’s this great event you should go to,’ and I’m like, ‘that’s my event!’” she said. “It’s kind of become very large and that’s kind of my goal is to have it become a community event that no one actually owns — it just exists on its own.”

She said she also hopes it serves as a way for beekeepers across the county and state to connect and learn from each other and raise awareness about the uniqueness of Hawaiian bees and the honey they produce.

“We don’t have an event for beekeepers in Hawaii, and that is what I want to try to do, is create the event for beekeepers to come together and network from all the different islands,” she said. “Hawaiian honey — it has properties that you can’t find anywhere else because we have plants and trees that you find almost nowhere else in the world and especially in the United States — it’s very specific.”

Hawaii Island is also one of the top providers of queen bees for the rest of the country.

“It’s one of the largest places for queen breeding in the world,” Collins said. “So, about 35 to 40% of the queens on the mainland in hives are from the Big Island … it’s because we can, we can rear queens year round because of our climate.”

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To learn more about bees and the event visit www.worldbeedayhawaii.com/.

Email Grace Adams at [email protected].