The hives arrived

I ordered a ‘starter’ kit of 3 hives, each with a stand, 3 medium boxes, inner cover, and lid. It didn’t sound like much, but when UPS arrived he had TWELVE boxes to deliver! Yikes! Luckily I had a hand truck (as did he) and we loaded them all into the garage.

Since hives are wooden and they’re outside in the elements all day long, they should be painted so they don’t rot. And being a designer, I was very excited about the paint colors! I went with light pastels (so they didn’t get too hot in the TX sun) of varying colors so the bees could distinguish their hive by color (supposedly bees can see very color that humans can see except for red. Who knew?!).

I went to Home D, bought all the supplies, and got started painting. I found that the best way was to put them all onto a rod and paint them while hanging up. You could leave them that way to dry. Easy peasy. Except that it was super humid so drying time took forever.

After they dried, we hauled them out to Hye and set them up on the hive stands in our new little Apiary yard.

We put down plastic sheeting (which helps keep Small Hive Beetles, SHB, out of the hives), covered that with mulch, and found some old cedar posts on our property that we used as ‘borders’. How cute is this? Of course, initially, each hive only has one box on it, but one day, they’ll look like little pastel apartments 🙂