Why paint the hive?

Having painted the school hives, the question is why, indeed?
The reason I decided to paint the school hives is that it looks better and as beekeeping at a school is always going to be a PR exercise to a certain degree, if the hives look good, they will have more of a wow! factor and thus engage people more. Furthermore, the paint does protect the wood to a degree. This is not a very strong argument as the cedar wood should withstand decades of weather, but it is an argument nonetheless. Also, if you have two hives quite close together, painting a big symbol above the entrance will help the bees recognise their hive.
So, if you want to paint them, paint them.
Make sure you use a paint that is water-based and has as few chemicals in it as possible. Standard B&Q fence paint should do. I used Ronseal Woodland Trust paint.

A Tower of Work: hive components after three coats

A few lessons learnt from my experience:

Keep the hive parts you want to paint inside until you paint them. Sounds obvious.

If you want to paint the stand, do so before you level the hives. As I had already levelled them, I did not want to remove the stands and then have to level them all over again. So they remained unpainted - which is not a huge issue and doesn't look that bad.

Don't paint a fancy colour scheme - keep them monochrome. Because the school colours are light and dark blue, I thought it would be a great idea to have the protruding sidebars dark blue and the main body light blue - big mistake. Keep it simple.
In addition the masking tape I use was obviously cheap, because it either didn't come off at all, or came off with the paint underneath. Joy...

Towards the End: protruding bars highlighted with dark blue

Don't worry if your paintwork is not the neatest. I also painted the edge of the queen excluders and crown boards and I had paint slapped all over the frames. It doesn't matter. The bees won't mind.

Keep the symbols simple. A square or triangle is quite sufficient. Going for a moon and star is all very fine, but not easy, and even less so when stressed, as I was (as time was slipping away).

It took me about eight hours to paint two brood chambers (deep), two supers, two roofs and the edges of crown boards and queen excluders with three coats, as well as put the symbols on (and correct the outlines numerous times...).