With all the discussion of the technique, it should be noted that bees have a good sense of color, and have a memory that tends to associate a color, as in a flower's color, with a location.
Once a bee gets to a general area, it clearly uses the physical landmarks and scent to zero in on the specific "target", be it a patch of blooms or "home".

So, if boxes are painted in different colors, and the distance moved is not too far, swapping hives might not have all the desired results.

To overcome the "row effect", where the outermost hives in a line tend to become the default for drifting bees, we thumbtacked pvc plastic lids purchased from a packaging overstock house and spray-painted with two different color dots each, so that no yard had a hive with a duplicate color patch.  We did this because we saw research hives at the Cornell Dyce Lab that had unique checkerboard patches with 3, 6, and even 9 different colors, and asked why.

Avoiding rows entirely is a good goal, but makes mowing the bee yard more complicated, and facing entrances southeast gets the girls out and about earlier than facing entrances other directions.

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