Post 17 of 29 in the AZ Hive series

The shed already existed before the bees did. It had corrugated metal siding — the kind with the long vertical ridges every couple of inches. Fine for a shed. Terrible for our purposes.

You can’t cleanly mount a hive entrance through corrugated metal. The bee passage needs to penetrate a flat surface and seal around the edges, and corrugation gives you a leak around every ridge. And you can’t paint a mural on it either — every line of the artwork would warp across the ridges.

So we stripped the metal off one end. Only one end — the rest of the shed kept its original siding, since the apiary only needed one flat wall. The work started March 10, 2021.

The rebuild.

• Pulled the corrugated metal off the chosen end.
• Wrapped the now-bare framing in Tyvek HomeWrap for moisture protection.
• Installed LP smart siding panels — flat, paintable, weatherproof.
• Painted the whole end gray.
• Cut a round portal near the peak for a bee escape.

That last item is small but important. The bee escape is a passage at the top of the shed that lets bees inside find their way back out — useful when one gets loose during inspections. We’ll get to bee escapes more thoroughly later in the series, but the portal had to be in place before any of the painting happened.

With the wall flat and painted, the shed was ready for the next two things about to happen on this surface: six bee entrances penetrating through, and a Scooby Doo mural going over the whole thing.

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Next: Painting the Scooby Doo Mural — projector tracing, weekend painting sessions with the daughters, and a clear poly coat to weatherproof it.