Why We’re Transitioning to Horizontal Bee Hives

When we first got into beekeeping, we did what a lot of beginners do: we bought a couple of Langstroth hives (the standard vertical, stackable box hives you’ll see in most apiaries) and read every beekeeping book we could get our hands on. 

We never joined a local bee club, but between the books, YouTube videos and plenty of trial and error, we figured out the basics.

One thing we got right from the start was skipping the chemicals. Our pharma-free lifestyle extends to the homestead, so we never treat for (varroa) mites or anything else. 

That part aligned with our values from day one. But in other ways, we were still following the conventional beekeeping playbook: frequent inspections, managing frames, and adding and removing supers on a schedule. We kept our bees alive (most of the time), harvested enough honey to feed our family, and learned a ton.

But over the past couple of years – as Kathy and I have leaned further into regenerative practices across the homestead – something about the way we were managing our bees started to feel off.

Specifically, we were spending a meaningful amount of time doing things to our bees, and not enough time letting the bees do what bees do.

That realization led us down a rabbit hole (pun intended, given our colony rabbit operation) into the world of natural beekeeping, and especially the work of Fedor Lazutin, Dr. Leo Sharashkin, and Michael Bush. 

What we found was a completely different way of thinking about the relationship between beekeepers and their colonies, and it’s reshaping how we approach our apiary.

What Natural Beekeeping Actually Means (and Doesn’t Mean)

I want to be clear about something upfront: natural beekeeping isn’t about neglecting your bees. It’s not a “set it and forget it” approach, and it’s not anti-science. It’s about trusting the colony as a living organism that has been solving problems for millions of years without human intervention.

The core principles, as outlined in Lazutin’s book Keeping Bees with a Smile and in Sharashkin’s extensive work, include:

• No chemical treatments. Not even “natural” ones like oxalic acid or essential oils. The idea is that bees unable to survive on their own shouldn’t be propped up with chemicals, because doing so weakens the gene pool over time.
• No sugar feeding. You leave enough honey for the bees to sustain themselves year-round. If you have to feed them, that means you’re taking too much honey (or starting with packages on empty equipment, which is a temporary exception I’ll discuss below).
• Minimal inspections. Instead of cracking open the hive every week, you observe entrance activity, hive weight, and external cues.
• Local survivor genetics. Rather than buying commercially-bred packages, you catch local swarms and propagate from colonies that survive without intervention.
• Bee-friendly hive design. Specifically, horizontal hives with extra-deep frames that better mimic the dimensions and thermal properties of a natural tree cavity.

If you’ve read Thomas Seeley’sThe Lives of Bees, a lot of this will resonate. Seeley’s research on wild honey bee colonies in the Arnot Forest at Cornell largely confirmed that feral colonies thrive without human management – often in well-insulated cavities with far deeper comb than a standard Langstroth frame provides.

Why Horizontal Hives?

The Langstroth hive was designed in the 1850s for commercial beekeeping. 

If you’re not familiar with it, picture stacks of square wooden boxes sitting in a field. Each box holds removable frames of honeycomb, and you add or remove boxes as the colony grows or shrinks. It’s modular, stackable, and optimized for transport. 

Those are real advantages if, for example, you’re a migratory beekeeper trucking hives across the country to pollinate almond orchards in California. 

But for a backyard or homestead beekeeper? Many of those advantages become irrelevant, and the downsides start to add up.

A horizontal hive, by contrast, is a single long box where all the frames sit side by side at one level. Think of it less like a filing cabinet and more like a long dresser drawer. 

The design we chose is the Lazutin-style hive from HorizontalHive.com, which is based on the Layens hive (a horizontal frame hive originally developed by French scientist Georges de Layens in the late 1800s, and later adapted by Russian beekeeper Fedor Lazutin with heavier insulation and other improvements for colder climates).

Here’s what drew us to this approach:

Less disturbance to the colony

Opening any hive lets in light and releases heat, and horizontal hives are no exception. The difference is in how much of the colony you disturb.

With a vertical Langstroth, you’re unstacking boxes and often disassembling the brood nest just to see what’s going on. With a horizontal hive, you pull frames one at a time from the honey end of the hive while the brood nest stays untouched at the other end.

For most of the year, there’s no reason to go near the brood at all. We peek at the honey frames in spring to harvest the surplus and do a single annual inspection of the brood area.

That’s it. The bees barely know we were there.

The bees expand more naturally

In both hive types, the beekeeper still decides when to give the colony more room. In a Langstroth, that means adding boxes. In a horizontal hive, it means adding frames after the last frame and before the division board (a follower board with a small gap at the bottom that prevents the bees from building comb in the empty space). Adding space is roughly the same level of effort either way.

Where horizontal hives really shine is when it’s time to take things away.

Harvesting honey from a Langstroth means pulling entire supers off the stack, which disrupts the whole colony. In a horizontal hive, you slide out individual honey frames from one end while the brood nest at the other end stays undisturbed.

And if you want to encourage swarming (which we do, for reasons I’ll explain below), you simply don’t add frames and let the colony decide it’s time to reproduce.

Better insulation

The Lazutin hive has two-inch insulated walls and a heavily insulated top. A standard Langstroth has three-quarter-inch pine walls, which offer minimal thermal protection.

While our area of Georgia (near the Alabama border) doesn’t get brutally cold, the insulation also helps in summer by buffering against extreme heat, which is arguably more important in our climate.

Extra-deep frames

A standard Layens frame is 18 inches deep, compared to 9-5/8 inches for a standard deep Langstroth frame. That continuous comb allows the winter cluster to move upward through the honey stores without encountering the break between boxes. It’s closer to what bees build inside a tree cavity, where the comb can run three feet or longer without interruption.

No heavy lifting

A full medium super weighs 40-50 pounds. A full deep can push past 80. In a horizontal hive, all the frames are at one level, so you’re never muscling boxes on and off a stack. You pull individual frames, which is especially nice during a Georgia summer when you’re already dripping with sweat inside a bee suit.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no trouble lifting an 80-pound box full of honey. But the same can’t be said for everyone — including our kids, who often want to participate in the honey harvest.

Can You Do Natural Beekeeping In a Langstroth?

This is the question I kept coming back to as we started exploring natural beekeeping, and the answer is “yes,” to a degree. 

Michael Bush has been doing it with 200+ Langstroth hives in Nebraska for decades. His approach, detailed extensively on BushFarms.com and in his book The Practical Beekeeper, includes:

• Foundationless frames that let bees draw natural cell size (which runs smaller than commercial foundation and may help with mite resistance).
• No chemical treatments of any kind.
• All eight-frame medium boxes for uniformity and lighter lifting.
• Upper entrances that reduce skunks, snow blockages, and the need to mow around hives.

Bush has proven that you can keep bees naturally in Langstroth equipment. His results are impressive, and his writing is some of the most straightforward and content-dense you’ll find anywhere in the beekeeping world.

That said, there are real limitations to how far you can take natural beekeeping principles inside a Langstroth box.

1. You’re still stacking boxes. Even if you go treatment-free and foundationless, the fundamental Langstroth design involves vertical management. That means adding and removing supers, and deciding when to expand. The decision-making burden stays on the beekeeper.
2. Thin walls mean poor insulation. Standard three-quarter-inch pine doesn’t come close to what a tree cavity offers. You can wrap hives in winter (and you should), but it’s a workaround, not a design feature.
3. Box breaks disrupt the nest. Every time the comb transitions from one box to the next, there’s a gap. That gap can impede winter cluster movement and create a thermal bridge. Some beekeepers address this by running double-deep brood nests and never using a queen excluder, but it’s still a compromise.
4. The inspection-oriented design encourages over-management. Langstroth hives are designed to be handled. The relatively shallow, removable frames and modular boxes almost force you to intervene and “manage” your colony regularly. 

While all that’s been a part of conventional beekeeping for over 150 years, horizontal hives are a better fit for what we’re trying to accomplish on our homestead.

Our Transition Plan (And Where Things Stand Right Now)

As of this writing, we have three Langstroth hives: two established colonies in medium boxes, and a new colony in a Mann Lake wax-dipped deep that we’re currently reviewing. We also have a horizontal Lazutin-style hive that we’re in the process of populating.

Here’s our plan going forward…

The Langstroth Hives Stay (For Now)

We’re not abandoning our Langstroth colonies. That would be disruptive and wasteful. Instead, we’re gradually shifting how we manage them.

Converting from mediums to deeps (and from foundationless to wax foundation). Two of our hives currently run on medium boxes with foundationless frames – many of which are cross-combed and glued together. We’re transitioning to deeps with wax foundation as colonies cycle through, adding deep boxes below and letting the bees expand downward into them. Once brood is established in the deep, we retire the mediums. This gives us a deeper brood nest that’s closer to what Lazutin and Sharashkin recommend, even within a vertical hive.

No more frame rotation or rearranging. We’ve stopped moving frames around. The bees organize their nest the way they want it, and who are we to second-guess millions of years of evolution? Brood goes where the queen decides, honey goes where the bees store it.

Minimal inspections. We check entrance activity, heft the hives for weight, and peek at honey supers in spring when it’s time to harvest any excess. We’re done with weekly frame-by-frame inspections. If something seems off, we investigate. Otherwise, we trust the colony.

Harvesting only the surplus. We take honey from supers in the spring, after the bees have had all winter to use what they need. The spring and fall nectar flows in Georgia are strong enough that a healthy colony can replenish what we take and still have plenty for the following winter.

Encouraging swarms. This might sound counterintuitive, but we’re intentionally not doing swarm prevention. Swarming is a colony’s natural method of reproduction, and it’s how we plan to populate our horizontal hives. When a Langstroth colony swarms, we’ll catch that swarm and install it in a horizontal hive. Over time, this means our horizontal hives will be stocked with locally-adapted bees that chose to swarm from our strongest colonies, which is exactly the kind of genetics Sharashkin recommends.

New Colonies Go Into Horizontal Hives

Any new swarms we catch, and any packages we may buy in the future, go straight into horizontal hives. We’re not adding more Langstroth equipment.

I should note that Sharashkin doesn’t recommend buying packages. His position is that commercially-bred bees lack local adaptation and disease resistance, and that catching feral swarms is a far better path to building a resilient apiary. We agree with him in principle, but we also live in an area where feral swarm opportunities are somewhat limited, especially when you’re just getting started. Sometimes you have to work with what’s available and breed toward what you want.

That said, we’re setting up swarm traps this spring, and our goal is to never buy packages again after this season.

The Practical Challenges of Being “In Between”

I’d be lying if I said this transition was seamless. It isn’t. Running Langstroth and horizontal hives simultaneously means two different frame sizes, two different management philosophies, and two different mental models.

Some specific challenges we’ve encountered include:

Equipment incompatibility

Langstroth and Layens frames aren’t interchangeable in any direction. Langstroth frames are actually longer than Layens frames, so you can’t drop them into a horizontal hive even if the depth were compatible (which it also isn’t).

Each system is completely self-contained, which means you can’t share frames, pull brood from one to boost the other, or use any of the usual tricks that beekeepers rely on when managing multiple hives.

We also discovered that our existing honey extractor, which is sized for Langstroth frames, won’t work with Layens frames. So we’ll need to invest in a new extractor at some point, or switch to crush-and-strain harvesting for the horizontal hives (which is actually more aligned with natural beekeeping anyway, since it forces the bees to draw fresh comb each season).

Feeding packages in a horizontal hive

When we installed package bees in our horizontal hive, feeding was less straightforward than in a Langstroth, where you can slap a top feeder on and call it a day. The Lazutin hive’s tight-fitting top bars don’t accommodate a standard feeder. We ended up using a frame feeder placed next to the colony, separated by a division board. It works, but it required some experimentation.

Old comb and the foundation question

All our existing medium Langstroth frames are foundationless, which sounds great in theory. In practice, many of the combs ended up glued together and cross-combed, making them nearly impossible to inspect or manage.

One of our hives had a lower box with comb so dark and old the bees abandoned it entirely. This experience pushed us toward using wax foundation going forward, which is what Sharashkin actually recommends for his horizontal hives (he’s not a foundationless purist).

The foundation for our Layens hives comes from Spain and is free of the pesticide residues that plague commercially-available beeswax in the US. For the Langstroth hives, we have to source foundation domestically, which is a real concern: virtually all US commercial beeswax carries some level of miticide contamination (coumaphos, fluvalinate, amitraz metabolites) from decades of in-hive chemical treatments. It’s one of those hidden costs of the conventional beekeeping system that most beginners never hear about.

Resisting the urge to inspect

This one is psychological, not practical. When you’ve spent years reading books that tell you to open your hives regularly, learning to leave them alone feels almost irresponsible. It took a conscious effort to shift from “I should check on them” to “they don’t need me checking on them.”

What This Means for Our Honey

We’re not running a commercial honey operation and never plan to. We keep bees primarily for pollination (the garden and fruit trees benefit enormously), for wax (which we use for candles and other homestead products), and for the small amount of honey our family consumes.

With a hands-off approach, our per-hive honey yield might go down slightly, at least compared to a beekeeper who aggressively manages for maximum production. We’re fine with that. The honey we do harvest will be from bees that weren’t fed sugar, weren’t treated with chemicals, and built their own comb.

In our view, that’s a better product, even if there’s less of it.

Resources That Shaped Our Thinking

If you’re interested in learning more about natural beekeeping, here are the resources that have been most influential for us:

• Keeping Bees with a Smile by Fedor Lazutin, edited by Leo Sharashkin. This is the book that started our transition. Lazutin’s approach is practical, well-reasoned, and deeply respectful of the bees as organisms.
• Keeping Bees in Horizontal Hives by Georges de Layens, also edited by Sharashkin. Originally written in 1897, this is a comprehensive guide to horizontal hive management that still holds up remarkably well.
• The Practical Beekeeper by Michael Bush. If you want to keep Langstroth hives naturally, this is the gold standard. Bush’s entire website is also a free and constantly updated treasure trove.
• The Lives of Bees by Thomas Seeley. The scientific foundation for understanding how wild colonies thrive without management.
• Dr. Leo Sharashkin’s YouTube channel and his workshops at HorizontalHive.com. Sharashkin’s talks and videos are what convinced us to actually make the switch.

Where We Go From Here

Our long-term vision is an apiary that essentially manages itself. A few horizontal hives stocked with locally-adapted bees, humming along without chemicals, sugar, or constant poking and prodding.

The Langstroth hives will stay in the rotation as long as the colonies in them are healthy, but we won’t be replacing them with more Langstroth equipment. They’ll serve as our transition hives, and the swarms they throw will seed the horizontal fleet.

Will this work? Honestly, we don’t know yet. We’re early in the process, and beekeeping has a way of humbling even the most well-prepared plans. But the philosophy feels right, the logic is sound, and every beekeeper who’s made this transition seems to arrive at the same conclusion: the bees know what they’re doing, and our job is mostly to give them a good home and then get out of the way.

If you’re thinking about making a similar shift, I’d encourage you to start by reading Lazutin’s book. You don’t have to change everything at once. You can adopt the principles (treatment-free, minimal inspection, no sugar feeding) long before you change the equipment. The mindset shift is the hard part. The hive design is just the last piece of the puzzle.

If you have questions about our beekeeping transition, just leave a comment below. And if you want to follow along as we document this journey, subscribe to our newsletter for updates from the homestead.