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Miami Palmetto High School junior Samira Moore has a passion for bees. Yep. Those busy yellow bees that buzz around collecting pollen and making delicious honey.
Those bees that many of us are afraid of because they might sting us.
But Moore knows that bees are actually quite beneficial.
She’s a seventh-generation beekeeper.
She says there are different bee species.
“The Italian bees are the nice bees,” she says.
“Africanized bees are aggressive. All bees will sting you.
A good beekeeper has a good, nice queen. You breed the queen to be nice and relaxed.”
Moore is the founder of a project called Bees for Good. She’s been working with women in a poor village in Costa Rica to help them create their own honey business. Moore lived in Costa Rica until she was nine. In the summers, she’d visit her grandfather in Indiana and help him with his bees.
Locally, she has her own backyard beekeeping and honey business called Have Some Honey.
In 2020, when COVID swept the world, in Costa Rica, the men went to the farms and the women stayed home. This caused hardship for many of the families. An organization called Creciendo Juntos helped her find the women who were able to take on beekeeping and use the opportunity to create another source of revenue for their families.
“It’s not too much work,” Moore says. “It makes sense. I went down and met them the first time. We picked out a spot on their land where they could put the hives.”
Back in Miami she got to work fundraising.
“I ended up getting a lot of donations,” she says.
The money paid for all the necessities for beekeeping, including bee suits with their names embroidered on them.
She found someone to sell them the bees and picked them up and set up the hives.
“I taught them everything I could without the actual hives,” she says.
Despite the language barrier, she taught them about the bees, the queen and the brood.
“I’m helping them create their own business,” Moore says. “I’m going to be handing the business to them. They are going to create their own business label. And bottling. Now it’s not just about them producing honey, it’s about empowering these women to become entrepreneurs. Many have gone to school until only fifth grade.”
A few weeks ago, Moore went to Costa Rica to help them extract honey.
“I think they had eight bottles of honey,” she says. “That was exciting.”
Moore hopes to expand the project to additional families in the neighborhood.
She hatched the beekeeping idea going into her sophomore year with Costa Rica in mind because of her mom’s work there.
“Bees are important for the ecosystem,” she says. “I met the ladies and installed the hives in 2024.”
At school, Moore is in the National Honor Society, and the Science National Honor Society.
She’s also on the varsity lacrosse team and a tutor for Tutoring for Tomorrow. She’s a member of the Focus Impact Foundation, a group that teaches financial literacy.
Moore is also the Chief Operating Officer for Volunteering Miami. She’s in charge of communications between Volunteering Miami and the organizations that participate on the website, or the Volunteer Fairs hosted by the organization.
Her job on student council is working on the environmental outreach board.
“We helped install a garden at our school at the end of last year,” she says. “We are possibly trying to bring bees into the school but that is kind of still up in the air.”
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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