About Dr. Leo Sharashkin

Dr. Leo Sharashkin is founder of HorizontalHive.com and editor of Keeping Bees With a Smile, a comprehensive resource on keeping bees naturally in horizontal hives. He contributes to American Bee Journal, Bee Culture, The Beekeepers Quarterly (UK), and many other publications, and speaks internationally on sustainable beekeeping, organic growing, and Earth-friendly living. He holds a PhD in Forestry from the University of Missouri and a Master’s in Natural Resources from Indiana University. Author of world-renowned research in sustainable agriculture, he lives with his wife and four children on a forest homestead in the Ozarks in southern Missouri where they raise bees in a variety of low-maintenance, easy-to-build horizontal hives.

About Fedor Lazutin

Our beekeeping methods were largely inspired by Fedor Lazutin, a highly successful natural beekeeper and author of Keeping Bees With a Smile: A Vision and Practice of Natural Apiculture. Fedor brought back the millennia-old tradition where the keeper’s primary tasks were limited to providing bees with an ideal habitat, and harvesting surplus honey once per year. Some of the highlights of his approach include never feeding bees sugar, not treating against disease, enhancing the local strain of resilient bees, and using bee-friendly horizontal hives with extra-deep frames of his own design. Fedor founded the model apiary and education center Medvinka located in a picturesque place in the Kaluga province 150 miles (230 km) southwest of Moscow. In addition to the wide diversity of local nectar sources, Medvinka is surrounded by fields of wildflowers planted especially for the bees each year. The result is pesticide-free honey with remarkable flavor. In October 2014 Fedor Lazutin taught a series of natural beekeeping classes and a 2-day workshop in Missouri, USA.

“Fedor Lazutin is one of Russia’s foremost natural beekeepers.”
— Dr. Tom Seeley, Cornell University, author of Honeybee Democracy