jennifer and others:

to the microphone, consider adding a bee cam pointed at the landing
platform.  also some sort of magnifying glass along the entry tube so
visitors can see the bees under magnification...this is really cool when
they have all the pollen packed onto their back legs.

keeping people and bees from mixing:
1.  as you'll no doubt learn from your beekeeper volunteer (as everyone
suggested, there are plenty who will want to work with you and who will add
enthusiasm to the project), bees are creatures of certain habits.  one is
that as they near the hive, they'll tend to follow the same flight plan.  in
our case, the entrance to the hive intersected a sidewalk, but was set back
about 20 feet.  the solution was to get the bees to come in high, so we
built a all fence.  the bees would fly in well above people and then drop
down to their platform.  to my knowledge, we never had a sting.

2.  be sure and put some sort of gate between the hive frame and the
ingress/egress tubes.  if you ever have to remove the hive, or if a tube
breaks, you can isolate the bees in their hives.

3.  make sure the design includes a means of delivering supplemental food
(liquid kind).  we didn't do this at first and had to retrofit. also
provided a handy way to add medicinal supplements as the beekeeper deemed
necessary.

jeff c
artspace

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