Bee School is Coming! Join us March 8, 2025. Learn More
Heike Williams will be our guest speaker
Born and raised in Germany, Heike earned a college degree in Food Technology before taking a job in Portland, Oregon, analyzing foods for Nutrition Facts labels. Discovering her passion for beekeeping she switched careers. After gathering valuable experience as a commercial beekeeper in the Oregon Coast Range, she went from 600 hives to six as she is fond of saying. Now she manages the six plus colonies in the teaching apiary at the Central Oregon Agricultural Research Center and assists in research projects the Honey Bee Lab is conducting in vicinity of Madras, the carrot seed capital of the world. (Do you know that every second carrot eaten anywhere in the world was grown from a seed produced in Central Oregon?) If she is not busy counting mites on sticky boards or honey bee foragers in a phacelia field, she enjoys hiking, baking and pulling weeds in her first-ever garden that wants to become a pollinator garden when it grows up.
Heike will also be leading us in a "hive dive" at about 11 am at the club apiary at Mountain Valley Gardens. If you would like to participate, please bring appropriate protective gear.
