How To Paint Poly Hives

In this video, I'm going to show you how to paint your polyhives and turn them from this into this. In this video, I'm going to show you how to paint all types of polyhives using masonry paint from Valspar. Now, in my previous videos, I showed you how I use spray paint to paint my polyhives, and whilst that worked quite well on the vertical surfaces, over time it's definitely degraded on the horizontal surfaces. The ones where I use masonry paint, they haven't fared quite so bad. So I'm just changing up the advice again. I wouldn't recommend using spray paint, and I would go with a good quality masonry paint, and the one that I'm using today is from a company called Valspar. Now the reason that I really do like the Valspar paint is because A, it's a very, very good quality external-grade masonry paint, but B, and for me kind of more importantly than that, is that you can get it in any single color that you like. Now I get it in these little tiny mixer pots, so I think these worked out at about £3 each. They were doing a deal at the time, but normally they're about £4 each, but you can have an unlimited scope in terms of the colour of the boxes. So for me, I don't want to save kind of like a few pounds buying a 25 litre tub of beige masonry painting, having all of my hives as beige. I'd prefer to kind of change it up and have like a different roof, a different crown board, a different box, and just have some nice colours in there as well. So I'm going to be painting all of my 9 frame Lysen Langstroth boxes this year with Valspar paint, and it couldn't be much simpler. In this video, I'm going to show you how to do it. So what I always find amazing with these little tubs is just how much you can get out of them. I'll kind of like do a rough estimate at the end and update it, but like you could easily get for one tub, do the whole polyhive, no problem. It's like £4 worth of paint. So you'll save a huge amount painting your own polyhives versus buying them painted. And I actually think that this paint here is a little bit better than the paint that you would get normally on polyhives. Now, is it bee-friendly? Definitely not while it's wet, but once it's dry, it's about as bee-friendly as you're likely to get. Completely inert once it's cured. This is the stuff that you see on the side of buildings, so there's no way they'd be allowed to put it on the side of buildings if it was going to cause any damage to bees. Now, a little tip I've learned, whenever you're painting these, don't do what I did originally and start at the top and then have to take everything off. Start at the bottom and then work your way up. It's loads easier. Now, I only ever bother painting on the outside. I definitely don't bother painting on the inside, and you're probably going to do quite a lot of damage to the bees painting on the inside, so I wouldn't recommend it. The bees will naturally coat the inside surfaces with propolis eventually, so you only need to paint the exterior. So you can see here I've got a lovely Kermit green. I've got tons of different colors here. I bought 12 pots of this at 12 completely different colors, all versions of gray and green. So today I'm just going to use a couple of the colors because I don't want to mess up all my brushes, but when you see these later on in the year, you will see that I've got 12 completely different colors of paint. So if you want it to look good, you definitely need 2 coats, but 2 coats is ample. Stick the first one on really, really light. You're never going to get the first coat looking good, but the second coat really does look good once the first coat is fully dry. So I'm just going to work my way all the way to the top, do the first coat. I'll let it dry overnight and then I'll finish it off tomorrow. So that's the end of the first coat, and as you can see, it's still a little bit patchy. You definitely need 2 coats as an absolute minimum, but don't worry too much about getting the first coat neat. Never going to get the first coat neat on poly like that, so just slap it on nice and thin. Make sure it's not running too much, let it dry, and then you'll see the second coat goes on way, way nicer than the first coat. Now you could leave it at that, 2 coats, and that's completely protected and it looks really nice and the finish is good. But I'm going to jazz this one up a little bit and I'm going to turn it into a full Black Mountain Honey camouflage mode. So all I'm going to do now is just do really small little blobs of alternating colors. I'll give it like an hour, 2 hours in between each color to dry, and I'll try not to get the colors to touch. Probably going to take like a few days to get this looking good, but take your time, let it dry, make sure it's nice and warm outside. It's like 12-13° today, so the paint's going to dry in about an hour, and you can just keep on coming out and applying the next layer. So, that's the first stage of the camouflage done. Make sure you leave it to dry at this point. If you don't leave it to dry properly, when you add the next layer on, it all starts smudging together and it all turns a really nasty brown. Take your time on this one. In a warm day, using that Valspar paint from B&Q, that'll be dry within about an hour. So this is about dry now. Probably only takes about half an hour in between coats if it's a nice warm day outside and you're applying it thinly. Tips for doing this though, you don't really want to leave any brush strokes there, and you don't want to leave any rough edges around each of the patches that you're putting on. You definitely don't want any run marks either. I just think run marks don't look particularly good at this point. But once you've done that, you can just go ahead now and pick any random color and start building it up across the different boxes. Even when you're doing a camouflage style, I think it's nice to alternate the boxes a little bit just to get some varying colors in there. And I know the temptation is, is just to chuck loads of different colors on, and I'll probably go a little bit over the top on this one, but I think 4 colors, 4 to 6 colors works really, really well, and it will give you this good camouflage effect. What you're trying to do is be as random as you possibly can. Don't make all the boxes look the same, Don't put the colors in the same area. Don't make all the splodges the same. It's really difficult to not do that. Like, we're humans, we like order, we like symmetry. So just try and do it randomly. The final thing to say is this is the perfect, perfect activity to do with kids. I'm doing this one here on my own for the video, but I've got about 20 of these hives to do, and little Ivy will come along and she will help me paint these. Especially the first coat, absolutely brilliant, because you can just make a complete mess of the first coat. It doesn't matter because you cover it up on subsequent coats. So, I'm going to pick a couple more colors with my 2 brushes and I'll go around again now and do another coat. Okay, so I'm going to pick up a bit more of the So it's coming on nicely now. That's 4 colors on. I'm going to add just 2 more colors, maybe 4 more colors, and I'm going to start adding a few little brush strokes, and I'm going to start smearing some of the colors a little bit together just to kind of give it a bit of texture, which is kind of what you would expect with a camouflage beehive like this. So, what's really cool at this point is if you get your paintbrush that you used for the previous color and then use the same paintbrush without cleaning it into the new color, dip it in so you're kind of getting like a little bit of a mixture, and then all you want to do is just go over the wet paint and just give it a one stroke like that. What that does is it blends it and it gives you these really cool unique strokes that mix the color together but give you kind of like the definition of the 2 different colors. Once it's dry, it will look really, really cool. So, So, it's really starting to take shape now, drying a lot quicker than I thought it was going to dry as well. So, I'm probably only leaving it like 15-20 minutes in between coats, and the fact that you're towards the end, it doesn't actually matter if the paint's a little bit wet because you get that nice streaky effect. One thing to be aware though is as you're building up the colors, you basically want to put less and less on each time. So, don't go over the top with a big streak of color. These are the base colors now, so I'm just going to add some tiny little accent streaks all over. I think we're finished. So then you soon realize that you probably put a little bit too much on, so I'm going to do one more color now, take that hit of the yellow off, and then this one is finished. So on the final coat, just make sure you go around touching it up, any paint runs, 'Cause you're not going to get another chance to come back and get that. So just a little touch-up, make sure there's no runs at all. So there we go, that's the polyhive completely painted. I'm really, really happy with how it came out. Top, top quality paint from Valspar, great range of colors as well. I'm going to add some darker ones onto my next one, a little bit more black, a little bit more brown, but I'm really happy with how it came out.