Painting the hive

James loved the painted hives that we saw at the Bluegrass Beekeeping School, and the one we liked most was auctioned off for over $300! So, unfortunately, we didn't come home with the new hive, but, it did lead us to spiff up our old one.

When we came back out to the farm the next day James and I set aside some time to clean up our empty hive. We want it to be perfect for our new colony, when they move in later this Spring.

We went ahead and moved it to the porch for cleaning, since we already know how much the neighbor bees get all up in our business when we open up anything bee related. We disposed of all of the deceased inhabitants and inspected the frames for any evidence of disease or pests.

Everything looked good, except we did see a few dead varroa mites in the baseboards. Luckily, James attended a lot of sessions on pest control in the hive at our conference so he is going to take care of them.

So we went ahead and cleaned everything up. We decided to leave the honey frames in the hive and give our new bees a head start, but that didn't keep our other hive from sending in the troops to ravage the stores. Within minutes there were three or four bees checking out our work, and within half an hour there were well over 100 crawling over the honey frames, stocking up. This was fine, since each frame, with honey, weighed well over 5 pounds a piece. There was plenty to go around.

While our bees were doing their robbing, I got to cleaning and painting our hive. James asked me to paint the hive body, so I got busy slathering on some clean white paint. Our hives were originally a greyish color, which was pretty boring.

James asked me to add something to the white base, he wanted a fun design, something like we had seen at the conference.

So, while he was fencing pasture for the cows, I got creative. Here are some pics of a sneak peak of the design so far!