Paint your hive roofs ...

[fatshark]

Has anyone checked the visibility of their apiary from Google Maps recently? Or bing.maps.com? Both appear to have updated satellite imagery. All I can say is … paint your hive roofs. My homemade (roofing felt) hive roofs were far less obvious than my purchased ones.

PS I wrote two earlier drafts of this post … both gave too much away. If you know what to look for it's very obvious.
PPS If Gavin thinks there's still too much info here just delete the thread … I'm of to buy some paint.

[gavin]

I painted a couple bright yellow yesterday! Was that a mistake?

I was sufficiently frazzled (and stupid) to leave the bag with all my tools, a brand new tin of exterior varnish, and a partly used newly bought big tin of yellow masonary paint at the front of the car while I brought more stuff back. By the time I'd loaded everything at the back I'd forgotten about the bag with the tins at the front .... you can guess the rest! I wonder what *that* will look like on Google Maps in the years to come. It was getting dark and my efforts with bags of sand, water, brush cleaner, and a small dustpan and brush weren't enough .... maybe Feckless Drone will post a picture of the resulting mess after the association meeting there tomorrow. The owner of the wee orchard that hosts our association apiary is OK with it, but I've yet to face the neighbours ....

Now there's a post that really does have too much info! :o

[fatshark]

Too late …

2028

[gavin]

LOL!!

And isn't it amazing that all that paint must have squirted out from under my front wheels and landed a couple of km away to the east?! :p

[fatshark]

Ssshh! I was trying to keep your location a closely guarded secret.

I've found some paint (http://www.halfords.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_storeId_10001_catalogId_10151_productId_80 0809_langId_-1_categoryId_165495#[object%20Object]).

PS easy to find my apiary from the air as it's surrounded by polystyrene chips. I dropped a full Sweinty poly super from head height yesterday. Spectacular. This was an accident. I was removing supers in the rain. The stack wasover two metres tall and I tried to remove the top two together and slipped. Raining again tonight and collected another half dozen. Same number to get tomorrow - in the rain - and then extracting starts. But first I'm off to pick up a radial extractor :o

[gavin]

Ahh .. get your drift. That'll be the apiary *not* near Longforgan then. Phew!

Camouflage paint, what will they think of next? Some tartan paint might be nice for the coming plebiscite. I'd buy that for the remaining equipment which is now never going to see the inside of that nice yellow tin.

It take it the 2m tall stack was gathered from an apiary rather than a single hive? Show off!

Looks like this thread is turning into the 'Doh!' thread. I wonder what other mishaps folk are willing to reveal? We've seen some crackers on other fora.

[fatshark]

It take it the 2m tall stack was gathered from an apiary rather than a single hive?

My hive stands have unusually long legs.