Many people know the contributions of Larry Adams and his wife, Sharon Adams, in helping to clean up and restore the Walnut Way neighborhood in Lindsay Heights. Not as many know, though, that he keeps several beehives in their backyard on North 17th Street.

His grandfather introduced Adams, an ex-Marine, to beekeeping as a child in Birmingham, Ala. A decade ago, not long after he and his wife helped create the Walnut Way Conservation Corp., Adams took a beekeeping course and then installed the hives to begin exposing his community, especially children, to a force of purposefulness and sustainability that typically goes unnoticed.

“I started beekeeping to change the perception of our neighborhood from a place of poverty and danger to a place of destination and abundance,” Adams, Walnut Way’s board vice president and environmental steward, said in a report the nonprofit published last year. “Tending to bees require complete focus and time on the task” and “hive management requires the beekeeper to move from fear to courage,” added Adams, who said his beehives produce hundreds of pounds of honey each year.

Adams has presented his beekeeping success at workshops focused on community development. Recently, he invited a group of Walnut Way teenagers to his backyard to experience beekeeping in an urban setting.