Rick Samyn wakes up at 4:30 a.m. every morning to check on his girls, except they aren’t his daughters, they are honeybees.
Born in Detroit, Samyn first began beekeeping after a neighborhood teacher gifted him a hive. He quickly became enthralled with the practice and moved to Tacoma, where he began an apiary program called the L’Honey Program at St. Leo Parish in partnership with the L’Arche Tahoma Hope Farms.
The 70-year-old currently operates seven apiaries with the parish, tending to about 40 to 50 hives, with each holding, at most, 80,000 bees. He said he manages about two million individual bees.
To Samyn, humans have a lot to learn from the bees…