The basics

After the hives were completed, the exteriors were given 1 coat of primer and 2 coats of exterior white latex. This was done primarily for to help preserve the wood. It was a bit of work to make them and we wanted them to last for a long time.

At this point, we could have called it complete, but didn’t. On https://horizontalhive.com/how-to-build/best-beehive-stand.shtml, I saw this example of a decorated hive box and I became a little intrigued.

I started looking for more examples of decorated bee hives and ended up on Pinterest where I started pinning ones I liked. My favorites can be found here. I realized this was beyond my capabilities so decorating the hives became Linda’s project.

A tiny bit of history

Decorating beehives has been a tradition in Europe and likely other places for at least 250 years. Some of the best known work is found in Slovenia. The paintings often pictured folktales as well as spiritual themes. More information can be found at this link.

Back to decorating

Linda thought that the best way to decorate the hives and the swarm traps was to use stencils. That made sense to me so I ordered two from Amazon. The links are here and here. Both had a good selection to choose from, but they were a little small for the hives. Linda did use them on the swarm boxes. Some of the results are below:

I thought they turned out pretty great.

That left us with nothing to use on the hives. We went to Hobby Lobby looking for ideas and found a large stencil themed in flowers on sale for a couple of dollars. It became the central piece in the first hive.

Linda wanted a sunflower theme on the second hive. We couldn’t really find anything. Finally, I started searching for a 3D printable stencil. I found one and printed it on my Fokoos printer.

After that I started to learn how stencil files were created. I found a couple of suitable and free to use images, did some file conversion magic, and used the results in Tinkercad to design the stencils. The results weren’t great the first few times, but I did come up with something Linda could use. The results are below.

And the third one is a work in progress as of 4/25/2023. It will be great!

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