Painted Hive Auction
Fundraising Opportunity: Art for Bees!
The Eastern Apicultural Society’s yearly meeting is happening in Cherry Hill for 2025. Every year EAS holds a Painted Hive auction, where youth groups (4H, Scouts, etc.) paint one or more beehive boxes and donate them to the auction. Your group then earns whatever the highest bid on your box is! We are working on getting the hive boxes sponsored so that the entry cost is free, but we need to know what the interest is. Please sign up here if your Girl Scout, or your troop, would like to paint a box. Deadline to indicate interest is Sunday, June 15.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Beekeepers take care of honey bees. Bees live in a group called a colony. The colony lives in a stack of boxes with a top and bottom called a hive. This project is to paint a beehive box.
The painted box will go to the EAS conference for beekeepers, where people will participate in an auction to buy the box. That means they will write down how much they’re willing to pay for the box... and then the next person can say they will pay more! And it goes back and forth all week.
Each box has four sides. The top and bottom are open. The four outside faces are what you will be painting. They will be outdoors year-round, so you will need to use paint that is rated for outdoor use, generally acrylic paint. (Please do not use glitter or metallics.) These are suggested paints, but you’re not required to use these:
Michael’s:
Amazon:
Do not paint the top and bottom rails of the box.
They will stay white. Do not paint the inside of the box.
That’s where bees live. It’s dark. They can’t see your art
and the paint is not good for them.
DESIGN
The theme of the auction is “Beeing in the Garden State of New Jersey.” Your artwork can be related to bees, bugs, butterflies, birds, animals, plants, trees, gardens, the Shore, Girl Scouts, or anything else you see around our beautiful state. The artwork can be simple or detailed. It can be a picture or a pattern.
Off-Limits: No politics, religion, obscenities, hate speech, or bullying.
If you are doing multiple boxes: You can make designs which match or coordinate, but please don’t create a design which requires Box 1 to sit on top of Box 2 to make sense. Beekeepers swap boxes around all the time, and you don’t want your awesome artwork to end up backwards or split in half over two colonies and be confusing.
HOW IT WORKS
After you are done painting and the paint is dry (check the bottle to see how long it takes), please make arrangements to bring the box to SUM Idria Knecht by Sunday, July 20 along with the information form filled out. We will transport your box to the EAS conference.
Your box will be displayed a table at the conference all week. People will write down what they are willing to pay for the box. At the end of the conference, the highest bidder will take the box and give the money to EAS, and EAS will send the check!
(Since this is an auction, there’s no way to guarantee how much people will bid. Manage your Scouts’ expectations appropriately.)
People come from all up and down the East Coast (and sometimes from across the country), so hundreds of beekeepers will be seeing your beautiful artwork.