Beekeeping: If You Paint It, They Will Come

My husband and I have been getting ready to keep bees for almost a year now and are anxiously awaiting the arrival of our first 2 packets of bees.  My husband assembled the beehives and I painted them.  Once the hive boxes were assembled and sanded, I wiped them down with a tack cloth to remove all the dust, then "strung" them on a 2x4 and a 4x4 that were balanced on some work surfaces in my parent's shop.  (The handle of a rake or shovel steadied on a couple saw horses in a garage would work just as well.) I did wrap the 2x4 & 4x4 in newspaper so that my lumber didn't get painted as well.  With some plastic drop cloths spread out below, I was ready to roll.

Instead of using the predictable white paint, I decided to add some color to our beekeeping adventure.  I purchased 2 quarts of Behr Exterior Enamel Ultra Premium (contains a primer) and had the store tint one yellow and one light blue.  I found that using a small sponge roller made quick work of the painting.

I got so caught up with my yellow paint that I found I had painted all the boxes yellow instead of leaving some to be painted blue.  So I ended up painted a coat of blue over the yellow for one set of boxes.

This left the box handle yellow and I was convinced that they looked much more charming that way.

So I painted the yellow box handles blue to coordinate.

I gave each set of hive boxes 3 coats of paint, allowing each coat to dry before adding another coat.
I still had quite a bit of paint left and my husband had made a "nuke" and a swarm trap that needed to be painted.  So instead of buying another color and wasting the remaining paint, I decided to mix the two colors and paint the swarm trap and nuke green.

Once everything had three coats (making sure to paint only the exterior-exposed surfaces and keep the bee's living space paint free), all that was left to do was clean up.

Now we're set with our cheerful-colored hives and they will have over a month for the paint to "air out" so all the residual paint fumes can dissipate before we hive our bees.