I started keeping bees in conventional hives, but quickly became disillusioned with the mechanical and unnatural way bees are treated and the synthetic medications they are routinely subjected to. After years of testing and experimenting with different hives, I settled on the horizontal (Kenyan style) top bar hive as the one that seemed best to answer the needs of the bees and my own desire for a close but more balanced relationship with them. I wrote The Barefoot Beekeeper in 2007 to highlight the problems that I could see being caused to bees both by modern chemical agriculture and inappropriate beekeeping methods.