Beautimous Bee Hives
I have beautimous bee hives. If it were up to me they'd be plain old boring white. Except for the gray ones where I needed a hive body NOW and all I had around the house was gray spray paint. But they'd be boring.Fortunately, my husband is a man of vision. He remarked "They'd be more interesting if they had some color."
In late Spring or early Summer I got some empty supers. We assembled them and I painted them white. Of course. Then I remembered my wise husband's comment. So we got some spray paint in assorted colors.
We had some family and friends out for the long Fourth of July weekend, and I put them to work painting hive bodies. It was pretty cool seeing the different ideas folks came up with.
Now I have a whole bunch of colorful hive bodies, plus two that my husband wants to decorate. They will come in handy in the Spring when my bees flourish and I split my hives and become a honeybee mogul.Labels: bees
posted by Leslie @ 6:30 PM
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12 Comments:
So happy to see postal again. Thanks! Hope he survives the winter.
Whats the news with the chicks you hatched?
WF, Postal has been having more adventures. I'll blog about them soon. We have a major predator problem with the chickens - we're down from 32 to about 13. I think it's a fisher. We built a chicken tractor to replace the dilapidated chicken house. I've got lots of pics and will blog about that soon, too.
Man, I really wanted pretty, colorful beehives. But Ernie is some beekeeping purist who believes they should be WHITE, period.
They look GREAT!
fisher?
KathyJo, Ernie is WAY too conservative and stuffy :)
WeekendFarmer, a fisher is also called a marten. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_marten
My hives are all white as well though yours could make me a convert. My kids paint birdhouses different colors so the birds know which house is theirs. Maybe the bees are better off too!
Warren, if you have kids that paint bird houses, you should let them loose with the bee hives. I only agreed because I knew it would please my husband and that's a lot more important than whether the hives are white and orderly... and I LIKE it!! Quite a lot.
Ooh, I have beehive envy! They are beautimous!
Lovely hives. Not keen on bees, them being buzzy and stingy and all but the hives are lovely.
Nothing wrong with traditional. :)
Be careful when you split your bees in the spring. Don't split any of the "weaker" hives, if you've had time to observe them. I split one of my weaker hives and lost both the split and the original hive. The new one never took off with a decent population, and the old one never recovered.
I've done a ton of reading recently both on and off the Internet about keeping bees. (it's much easier to read about bees than obtain them this year in the uk but that is another story, and i've now fixed it)
Having seen your fab looking hives I later came across a comment that by making each hive look different you can help stop bees 'drifting' between hives. So you fab looking hives may also have a practical purpose.
I am new to this blog site. Your husband has the right handle on the situation of different looking hives. Suppose that you moved to a new house in a development and all the houses were the same shape, style, and color. You would get lost as to which one was yours. So you plant different flowers and plants in your yard, and placed them different than your neighbors. Now when you come home, you see and know your house quite easily. The bees do the same thing. Look for the differences, a twig on the porch, a grass stem on the side of the house, those two rocks leaning on the log in the front yard.
You can see that the different colors and shapes would be a tremendous help in recognizing home.
I like your blog. Keep up the good work and I will visit more now that I know where it is.
Peaches
Pensacola, FL
www.beekeepersfriend.com
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