If you Google "bee houses", "Slovakia", "Carniola" etc, you'll soon come across Eastern European methods of hive placement and paint schemes. Quite often hives are stacked 3 or 4 high, maybe 20 or more in a row, butted up close together - and yet the bees seem to manage to find their own entrances ok. Often they have trailers stacked like that, too.
If you Google "Anton Janscha", you'll see some exotic examples of painted hives, although most of the guys over there settle for block colours - squares, circles, diagonal stripes and so forth ...
LJ