The hive gets paint and final assembly

The hive gets a traditional paint job.

Complete painted and assembled hive.

     Now that our hive has been built, the next step was to get it painted, put together and ready for the girls. This was pretty straightforward and probably the easiest step in the whole hive building process. As I understand it, bees don’t like strong smells like paint, so it was important that we got the hive painted and gave it plenty of time to dry so the smell would dissipate. As is tradition, we only painted the outside of the hive. When the paint was dry I gave it another coat. When that coat dried, I took all of the hive parts over to the apiary and assembled them. Now, except for the feeder, the hive is ready for the girls.