Last year the Phoenix hive was plagued with many issues:

Phoenix Hive is Queenless   April 14, 2012
Phoenix Appears to Have a Queen   April 26, 2012
Phoenix Hive...Daughters Know Best?   June 2, 2012
Phoenix Changes Mind About Supersedure  June 7, 2012
Adding the Artificial Swarm to Phoenix   July 8, 2012
Phoenix Queen In A Pinch   August 5, 2012
Marking the Phoenix Queen January 28 2013
Phoenix Hive Has No Brood February 7, 2013
End of Phoenix Hive February 13, 2013


Actually, looking back at last year's events for this hive you might consider it was cursed.

I'm reusing the hive boxes and most of the frames (some were too old and needed to be scraped clean), but something needed to change to break the bad luck.

We decided to repaint the entire hive today from the screened bottom board all the way up to the telescoping cover.




It was raining outside today, and the kids needed something to do, so I let them run the brush and rollers.




Here's a picture of the final product. I decided to paint the metal part of the top cover too, just to see if the paint would stick.




Hopefully in a few weeks we'll be able to get a split made from the hives at my dad's house, and this hive will again have  occupants.