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I joined the 3 Pasos Program at California Baptist University as an undergraduate teaching assistant, first by working on a research project about the geometry of beehive cells and later by helping with the Primer Paso summer bridge program for high school students. The 3 Pasos program is built around a Familia-Cohort mentorship model that emphasizes community, belonging, and hands-on STEM experiences for underrepresented students. Our project asked a simple but fascinating question: why do bees build hexagonal hives? Exploring this led me to study ideas such as surface-area-to-volume ratios and isoperimetric properties and then share those ideas with younger students. During the summer bridge, I helped design and run activities where students used indirect measurement to estimate the height of buildings, applied dimensional analysis to physical problems, and explored how natural designs like hives connect to mathematical efficiency. My role was to guide students through the problem-solving process, encourage them when they were stuck, and help them present their findings at the end of the program. Pre- and post-program surveys were administered to measure changes in non-cognitive factors such as academic self-efficacy, sense of belonging, motivation, academic hope, and knowledge of campus resources, and learning assessments were conducted to measure gains in academic knowledge and skills taught during the bridge curriculum. The results were encouraging: participants reported increased confidence in tackling STEM problems and greater excitement about seeing math in everyday contexts. This work illustrates how combining research, teaching, and near-peer mentoring can support student learning and persistence in STEM through a cohort-based model.