Bee Sharing: How to transform an apiary into a digital product

A new regular column on VC with long reads – “Ode to Business: Growth Stories of Russian Enterprises in the Words of Their Founders.” Today, we have the story of BeeSharing and how Artem Zharov ventured into beekeeping, created “honey futures,” and transformed his small mountain apiary into a digital product.

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Artyom Zharov shared his story, and I am publishing the story on his behalf.

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The Path to Beekeeping

I was born in St. Petersburg and spent my childhood there, but every summer, I would go to my grandmother’s village. It was there, at the age of seven, that I learned how to make a campfire, chop wood, and tend to garden beds. The summer of 2006 would have been no different, if not for one change: a computer entered my life. I sat down at it when I was 15 and only emerged five years later. During that time, I had the opportunity to explore the works of Artemy Lebedev, drop out of school in the 10th grade, and completely immerse myself in design.

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At my grandmother’s dacha, I’m 18 or 19 years old. “Five-year plan at the computer” was sometimes interrupted by nature and a samovar 🙂

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No, the years spent in front of a computer didn’t diminish my interest in “life in the great outdoors” or make me forget how to chop wood. Around 2012-2013, I gravitated back towards this lifestyle and became a regular reader of Vladimir Rechev’s blog, “Life in the Trees.” In this blog, a programmer detailed his experience of moving from a St. Petersburg apartment to an eco-settlement a few hours’ drive from Pskov.

I saw a real-life example of how rural life improved a person’s quality of life: providing access to pure water, fresh air, and their own produce. And the daily routine in the countryside! It’s filled with numerous small events and actions that yield instant and tangible results, which can’t be said for office or digital work. For example, if you need water, you go to the spring, fill a bottle, and bring it back to the house.

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As for the place where the apiary would later be established, I ended up there almost by chance. It lacked the conveniences and services that city boys and girls were accustomed to. There was no centralised water supply or gas supply, and electricity came from our own solar panels.

Yes, a lifestyle like that intrigued me, but after leaving St. Petersburg, I initially headed south through cities: first Voronezh, and then Krasnodar. It was almost by chance that I ended up in the place where the apiary would later be established.

With the arrival of our first child, we wanted to be closer to nature, and on Avito, my wife and I found an ad for a peculiar octagonal house with enormous panoramic windows in an eco-settlement located 6 kilometers from the nearest town. There, the conveniences and services that city boys and girls were accustomed to were absent. There was no centralized water supply or gas supply, and electricity came from our own solar panels.

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And while we moved into an already constructed house, the “first eco-settlers” had arrived several years earlier, setting up tents in a pristine field with the intention of building something during the summer in order to somehow survive the winter in the mountains.

They were truly different people, even more unconventional than my wife and me: they not only laid the foundation for the eco-settlement but also later taught me openness, kindness, patience, and to some extent, detachment. By the way, my future business partner in BeeSharing turned out to be one of these eco-settlers.

Creating an apiary

I used to dislike honey and knew nothing about bees. I had no honey consumption habits, and I only knew about northern honey with its distinctive taste: robust, sweet, and concentrated. However, when I moved to the south and tried local honeys, I realized that the taste could be different—quite distinct from what I was used to in the Northwestern part of the country. It sparked my desire to get to know bees better and perhaps even start an apiary.

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Me and Misha, my future business partner in Bee Sharing, are having fun together.

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However, I never started my own apiary because I returned to city life – I moved to Krasnodar. On the other hand, Mikhail Kletsky, one of the eco-settlers, did start one: first with one hive, and then with three more. It was at this point that I felt the call of the forest again. I began spending more time with him, and we became the best of friends.

It was Mikhail who introduced me to beekeeping, taught me how to work with bees and hives. I joined him in working on his small apiary and invested some of my savings into its growth. The first season went quite well: we produced honey for ourselves, our friends, and even sold a bit through Avito. I handled the sales and designed the honey jars, but I quickly grew tired of competing in the homemade honey niche solely based on price or packaging.

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Yes, we sold our homemade honey at a good price (₽1200/kg), but there wasn’t much of it: about 20-25 kilograms from one hive, whereas large producers gathered about 80 kilograms of honey from their migratory apiaries.

Together with Mikhail, my business partner, we realized that without external investments, our apiary would take a very long time to grow to 100 hives. We didn’t want to attract borrowed funds in the form of loans, nor did we want to compromise on the quality of the bees’ lives and the honey they produced. No, we definitely didn’t want to feed the bees sugar to extract more honey during the winter.

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There is always work to do in the apiary: it doesn’t happen that you set up a hive and just collect honey.

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We wanted to keep everything as it was but find a way to generate growth and money from somewhere. That’s when we realized that only an economic change would allow us to do that. We started looking towards subscription and sharing models. Almost immediately, the idea of “honey futures” emerged: we could attempt to sell what we didn’t have yet. Take money upfront, produce honey, and deliver the product to the customer. We did some quick calculations, estimated what we could sell – beehives and the experience of remote ownership.

The flood of ideas about “honey futures” was so overwhelming that we started drowning in them. Fortunately, we stopped and shifted our focus to discussing a name for the project. Literally, within half a minute, it came to us – “BeeSharing.” I rushed inside, typed the word into a search engine, and checked the availability of the domain. The very first result from Yandex presented me with Oleg Barmin’s project, “My Apiary” – exactly what Mikhail and I had just been discussing while sipping tea by the lake. The same economy, the same model, but launched just a week or two earlier.

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That very announcement by Oleg Barmin, who had launched a similar project just a few days earlier.

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The initial thought when I saw the existing similar project was to abandon the whole adventure. Everything has already been thought of, why bother with this if we won’t be the first? But within 15 minutes, I realized that other people had already tested our value hypothesis, and we could learn from their findings, value proposition, and current state of affairs.

It turned out that they had even made their first sales! That’s when we understood that although Oleg Barmin had launched a similar project in the mountains of Adygea just a week and a half earlier, we should simply start working on BeeSharing.

We turned towards a new business model and transitioned from selling honey to end consumers to the digital stage, where the product became not only honey in jars but also the remote experience of hive ownership, monitoring it and the bees inhabiting it through a developed digital system and a user's personal dashboard.

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The transformation of our small mountain apiary began. We shifted towards a new business model and transitioned from selling honey to end consumers to the “phygital” stage, where the product became not only honey in jars but also the remote experience of hive ownership, monitoring it and the bees inhabiting it through a developed digital system and a user’s personal dashboard.

We offered people the opportunity to own beehives, pay annual fees to the apiary staff for the maintenance of these bee homes, and receive 20-23 kilograms of honey in jars with designs tailored to their own preferences.

Company growth

I love bees, and that’s why I poured my love for this endeavor, my soul, into BeeSharing. This was unmistakably reflected in the landing page I created in 2021: beyond words and images, you could see the passion and love for beekeeping, rather than just an appeal to buy a hive with honey. The audience picked up on this meaning from the first lines, and Maxim Ilyakhov from “Glavred” expressed admiration for the website, even though he scolded the very idea of selling hives and bees 🙂

By the end of 2021, I published the first article about BeeSharing on VC and… discovered new growth opportunities. Although the project seemed very appealing and exciting, I constantly doubted its feasibility and success. I didn’t expect the explosive demand that my article “BeeSharing – honey mining” generated: tens of thousands of views, hundreds of comments, thousands of visits to the website.

We didn’t even have a legal entity by that time, and payments on the website were processed through YooMoney, which was connected as an individual entrepreneur. We constantly hit the payment gateway limits (₽250,000/month), and customers would write to support, saying, “I’m already in a taxi, I need to make a gift, but the payment on the website isn’t going through. Take my money, send me a certificate for a hive!”

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The explosive demand not only brought joy but also a lot of work!

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I had never experienced such a “success story” before, and it was quite a novelty for me, which was very inspiring. Even the problems with payment gateways turned out to be in our favor: a few customers (who also happened to be investors), trying to pay for the hives, saw the message that the seller’s limit had been reached and thought that we were experiencing wild overbooking with thousands of orders. This further piqued their interest in our project.

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Interest in BeeSharing extended beyond VC and the internet; even traditional media outlets got involved! A TASS correspondent managed to catch us right in the middle of the excitement!

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All the problems began a month later: Misha, my business partner, died in a winter ice hole. He was my best friend, my brother in a sense. It fell to me to inform his family about the tragedy and raise the global question of what to do next with the apiary and BeeSharing.

Together with Misha’s family, we decided to continue with the project and involve more people in it. The packaging center, for example, is now located in St. Petersburg, which turned out to be very convenient since up to 90% of our customers are residents of the northern capital and Moscow, and it’s cheaper and faster to ship honey jars from the city on the Neva River than from Kuban. We also brought in more workers for the apiary from our friends who were beekeepers and neighbors in the eco-settlement, and I was able to focus primarily on IT processes and promotion.

Beekeeping in Kuban

Three years ago, BeeSharing was successfully launched with limited resources and a small team, but things are changing now. The reason for this change is not only the growth of the project but also changes in Russian legislation. It’s surprising, but just two years ago, the work of beekeepers was not regulated in our country. The first federal law dedicated to the development of beekeeping came into effect on June 29, 2021. Before that, beekeepers not only didn’t follow any laws but also didn’t pay any taxes 🙂

Now, agricultural products are gradually being integrated into the “Honest Mark” system, but honey is not yet included, as it has already happened with dairy products. As for the “Mercury” system, which controls animal products and tracks all movement and laboratory testing, we don’t fall under it.

Our offer is structured in such a way that BeeSharing customers (hive buyers) become full-fledged owners of the bee house, and the honey from their hive is for personal consumption, not for sale. And yes, if a person wishes, they can take their hive at any time because they are the owner, and we are the team that services the bee house and collects honey from it.

Today, we no longer have issues with payment gateways, legal entities, and documents for corporate clients like we did a few years ago.

We did start using “Mercury” recently: we have become a honey supplier for several companies in the HoReCa segment. And yes, today we no longer have issues with payment gateways, legal entities, and documents for working with corporate clients like we did a few years ago. It’s amusing that even with our growth rate, not all laws and market institutions can keep up.

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A forest visitor ventured into the hive. Perhaps it was craving some honey?

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On the Kuban, where our apiary is located, honey is loved not only by people but also by raccoons (there are no bears here). We would like to insure the hives against these unwanted guests, but insurance agents still lack the expertise to assess and insure beekeepers. There is no ready-made solution where you can submit an insurance application, and an insurer comes to assess it a week later.

Even the local authorities in the Krasnodar region are not particularly interested in beekeepers. They are more inclined to provide grants to enterprises involved in large cattle breeding (cattle) and year-round greenhouses rather than supporting beekeepers in developing their apiaries. However, there are people within the ministry who whisper that they can help for 10% of the grant.

Overall, the Krasnodar region is not the best place for a small agricultural project. Last year, for example, the Kuban region became even less friendly for small farmers: it was excluded from the scope of a new federal law that allows agricultural land to have a plot with a residential building. Across the country, farmers can demarcate a piece of land from their hectares, build a permanent structure on it, and live there—but not in Kuban.

Despite the local laws, thanks to our love for bees and the support of our customers, our enterprise is thriving. This year, we offered additional options for our hives on our apiary: bee scales and real-time cameras. While the camera is self-explanatory and is ordered by every third customer, the situation is quite different with the scales.

The apiary today.

Bee scales are an unexpected tool that shows the total weight of the hive with honey, with bees, and without them. Today, for example, it weighs 25 kilograms, and tomorrow it’s 26. Why keep an eye on this? Well, it’s interesting to observe this in parallel with the weather on the apiary. If it’s rainy today, the bees won’t fly anywhere; they’ll stay in their hives and consume their honey reserves.

If the rain lasts for a whole week, the hive will lose about 4-5 kilograms. But if the weather is excellent outside and the mountain meadows are in bloom with acacia or hawthorn, then the hive will gain a kilogram or more every day. Currently, one out of every ten customers orders scales for their hive, so the desire to watch the bees and the apiary outweighs the interest in the internal processes of the hive for now.

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Customers don’t like to look at charts showing changes in hive weight – they prefer videos and photos from the apiary.

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Overall, within BeeSharing, we often contemplate gamifying the customer experience of hive ownership, but we haven’t yet found a simple and appealing solution that can be scaled for mass adoption. So, if you have any suggestions for gamifying remote hive management and ownership, feel free to share your ideas.

Bee sharing of tomorrow

Currently, BeeSharing is transforming into a marketplace that directly connects end consumers of honey with its producers (beekeepers). On one hand, I aim to assist beekeepers with digitizing their businesses and selling small batches of honey at a high retail price. On the other hand, I strive to provide consumers with the opportunity to purchase quality homemade products at honey market prices.

These changes are happening gradually and with small steps. Currently, beekeepers who are part of BeeSharing and sell hives with honey directly to end consumers are earning twice as much per kilogram of natural sweetness sold—₽750 instead of the previous ₽350-₽400. This provides more stability and flexibility in managing their hives, allows them to focus more on customer relations, and establish direct connections with buyers to exchange emotions and stories.

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Exactly such an offer allows beekeepers to sell small wholesale batches of honey to honey enthusiasts at retail prices.

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I truly believe that a beekeeper should focus on beekeeping and do this job well, rather than spending their energy on designing honey jars and looking for retail buyers to sell honey at a good price. This is the pain point of my fellow beekeepers that I’m trying to address with the BeeSharing marketplace. An interesting situation arises with honey sales, to be honest. When you have a small apiary, your homemade honey easily gets distributed among relatives, close friends, and acquaintances.

And it is sold at a high price because it’s a top-quality product. However, when you increase the number of hives, selling honey at a high price becomes increasingly challenging because you start competing for unfamiliar buyers on marketplaces, Avito, and fairs.

Currently, on the BeeSharing marketplace, we only onboard those beekeepers who meet two key criteria: they produce excellent honey and actively manage their social media accounts, meaning they are capable of sharing the beauty of their craft and emotions with their followers. I believe that through direct interaction between beekeepers and honey buyers, we can revive the culture of honey consumption in our country.

Currently, only health-conscious individuals and older people seem to be interested in honey, so there is tremendous growth potential in the market.

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For more details about the growth of the apiary, purchases of bee packages and hives of Russian origin, bee diseases, the indifference of the Kuban authorities to beekeepers, and the current transformation of BeeSharing into a digital marketplace, you can listen to the one-and-a-half-hour conversation with Artem Zharov in Episode #1 of the “Ode to Business” podcast.

To listen to the podcast episode “Ода Делу” with Artem Zharov about the growth of Pchelosharing on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Yandex.Music
• Spotify
• YouTube
• other streaming services.

Learn more about Pchelosharing at pcheloshering.rf.

“Ode to Business” recreates the content format that was regularly published on VC 3-4 years ago, focusing exclusively on the “real sector of the economy” and “growth stories of Russian companies in the words of their founders.” If you miss such content on a regular basis, let us know in the comments. And subscribe to “Ode to Business” on Telegram: announcements of new stories of growth of Russian small and medium-sized enterprises and cards with quotes and facts from conversations with company founders are published there.

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By Producer Victor Boyko @http://odadelu.ru/ https://t.me/odadelu

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Artem Zharov Founder and designer of BeeSharing and BeeSharing/Gift

Published with the permissions of the authors. The original article is here.

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