The Kenyan topbar hive is having great success in African and is gaining popularity in other continents. This hive model allows the transition from a traditional beekeeping with fixed comb hives, to a more sophisticated, but still easy to practice beekeeping. In fact, the advantage of this hive model is that it is still easier to build and manage than the so-called "modern hives" using movable frames and honey supers such as the Dadant hive and Langstroth hive. This document provides an overview of the pros and cons of the Kenyan topbar hive and explains in detail how to build it. This document was developed by Beekeeping Network North-South (BNNS) in collaboration with Daniel Mathieu who provided all illustrations contained in this document.