By Julie O’Connor and Heike Williams
In Memoriam
Naomi Price
1950 – 2025
The Central Oregon beekeeping community lost Naomi Price, a friend, teacher and colleague. Naomi who kept bees in long hives due to being bound to a wheelchair cared passionately about bees and, therefore, about beekeeping. She focused on how bees function and what bees need. This drove her passion for understanding the science underlying healthy honey bees and understanding and promoting a holistic ecosystem for honey bees and pollinators generally.
Naomi was incredibly generous with her knowledge. She mentored many, many beekeepers and made numerous presentations to the public and at the local beekeeping association in Central Oregon (COBKA). She joined the Oregon Master Beekeeper Program (OMB) in the very first years of its existence, first as a student and starting in 2016 became both an instructor of in-person classes and a mentor. She set very high standards for herself, and her mentees who she challenged to think critically. Her communication was straightforward (e.g. “who wrote that nonsense!”), compassionate and usually laced with humor. A regular attendee of the team mentor meetings in Central Oregon, she always strived to improve the OMB program. In recent years her focus was on how to improve delivery and subsequent retention of beekeeping knowledge to new beekeepers. It was upon her initiative that this spring a team of mentors put together a series of OMB classes with hands-on and visual components for new students which were very well received.
Our community and our natural world have suffered a great loss. We will be better beekeepers and better stewards of their environment because of her.
A few voices of the beekeeping community
Carly Sullivan (mentee in the OMB Program): “Naomi taught me everything I know about beekeeping, and she did it with a direct and compassionate tone that ensured every lesson learned would stick with me for a lifetime.”
John Connelly remembered Naomi saving his life in 2012 during an open apiary workshop by keeping a level head and calling 911 when he got stung and went into anaphylactic shock. “Thank you for giving me life Naomi”, he writes.
Clyde Dildine recalled that Naomi offered to mentor him when they first met many years ago even though he wanted to keep in Warre hives. “You see”, he says, “she taught me that it does not matter a wit what box or contrivance you put your bees in. You must first and foremost understand our bees, their biology, their habits, …”
Lisa Baldwin found in Naomi a perfect teacher for her 16-year-old daughter. “We will do our best for the bees, better care for them because of her, and certainly pay it forward like she did for us.”
Bindy Beck-Meyer has a fond memory of Naomi one year during the state bee conference overflowing with enthusiasm about what she learned from viewing a bee under the microscope. Bindy says that Naomi “always dug deeper into the science behind what makes a healthy environment for bees, asking questions that pushed our understanding further and encouraging us all to think more critically and compassionately about the natural world.”
Rod Jacobsen tells the story how Naomi and her husband Larry shared seeds of many pollinator plants with him and everybody else. He states that “She will live on through the seeds & plants that she disseminated, the COBKA community & my memories.”
Kim Brannock who crossed path with Naomi and Larry just last year is full of appreciation of the way Naomi, skillfully and generously, helped her and her bees through the first year. “Naomi” she writes, “was full of light, and artful beauty, combined with the most respected knowledge based on deep research of bees.”