472 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



July 15 



such a box mir/ht be made for about 15 cents 

 in the rough; but to have it made in good 

 shape, and painted, 75 cts. or a dollar would 

 be a fair price for it. But I had to i)ay 13.00, 

 and tlien another dollar for a badly printed 

 Httle book with a dozen j)ages telUng how to 

 use it. Well, the Bural New - Yorker of .July 

 9 gives a couple of letters of complaint from 

 those who ordered day-old chicks from W. 

 R. Curtis, of Ransomville, N. Y. They 

 may be a big institution; but I think it is 

 no more than fair that chicken folks, espe- 

 cially the beginners, should have notice 

 that W. R. Curtis & Co. are more concerned 

 about getting the dollars in their gras]) than 

 they are in giving satisfaction to their cus- 

 tomers afterward. 



THE SITTING HEN VERSUS THE INCUBATOR 

 FOR STARTING GERMINATION. 



The article below I clipped from the Peta- 

 hima Weekly for Jan. 22: 



I once placed a number ot infertile eggs that had 

 been tested out of the incubator on the third day 

 under a broody hen, thinking to give them to her 

 for a short time only, and see whether she really 

 meant business or not. I did not receive the eggs I 

 intended to place under the hen, and no more at- 

 tention was paid to her. What was my surprise 

 when, at the end of about three weeks, she came off 

 with about three chicks. There were eight eggs in 

 all, and I at once examined those remaining in the 

 nest. Four were still clear and one rotten, showing 

 that it had started to develop. 



This set me thinking, and I made up my mind to 

 investigate further. If I was throwing out fertile 

 eggs from my incubator I wanted to know it. I 

 soon learned that experiment stations had like ex- 

 periences, and issued statements that a hen would 

 often start and hatch eggs that an incubator would 

 not start, but they gave no explanation of the 

 cause. It was noi hard to find, however. It Is due 

 to the fact that the incubator heats the whole egg, 

 while the hen applies heat only to the top next to 

 the germ. 



I am not surprised at the above. From 

 some experiments I made I have for some 

 time felt pretty sure that a sitting hen has 

 some strange "power to get a larger percent- 

 age of fertile eggs than any incubator — at 

 least any incubator I am a(?quainted with; 

 and if I am correct one of the poultry secrets 

 that has been offered for sale was the plan 

 of putting your eggs under a sitting hen for 

 three or four days, or even a week, before 

 putting them into the incubator. The state- 

 ment was made that almost any incubator 

 would produce a good hatch if a sitting hen 

 set the pace or brooded over them for the 

 first week. You may remember some of 

 my experiments a year ago with eggs taken 

 from a sitting hen and placed in our con- 

 tact-heat incubator. They hatched out nice 

 chickens almost every time. Since coming 

 back to Ohio I have allowed five hens to 

 to hatch out chickens. Three of them stole 

 their nests; two of the three hatched every 

 egg btit one. One of the three hatched ev- 

 ery egg, and has every chicken yet. One 

 hen stole her nest, hatched every egg by the 

 first of July, and never was shiit up at all, 

 and she has every chicken yet. Ry the 

 way, T have two neighbors who have hatch- 

 ed with incubators and hens something like 

 500 chickens each. Both got along nicely 

 for a while; but along in June I was asked 



to tell, if I could, what to do to stop the 

 chickens from dying. Now, I am not a 

 professional chicken doctor; but the safest 

 and sanest thing I could think of was this: 

 Put the hens and chickens out in an open 

 field away from the rest, where no other 

 fowls can have access, if possible. Let the 

 hen run where she pleases with her chickens 

 — of course, making sure they have good 

 water to drink and plenty of broken grain 

 of different sorts — say the best quality of 

 baby-chick food. So far as I know, both 

 the incubator chicks and those hatched un- 

 der the hen have ceased dying. Where the 

 mother hen can lead her chickens here and 

 there until they are tired out toward the 

 close of the day, and in a hurry to get to 

 their roosting-place, they are under natural 

 conditions; and where they have consider- 

 able territory to run over, this mother-hen 

 will help them to pick out what nature de- 

 mands; and much the same thing, I think, 

 is true with chicks hatched in an incubator. 

 Do not have too many flocks on a small 

 area, and give them a chance to ramble to 

 their hearts' content, and then they will, 

 as a rule, come out all right. 



The suggestion in the paragraph I have 

 quoted, that the hen starts fertility when 

 an incubator would not is because she ap- 

 plies heat only to the top of the egg, I do 

 not think is all of the reason, however. It 

 is right in the line, you will notice, of the 

 idea of "contact heat." Perhaps we shall 

 some day wrest from Nature her secrets so we 

 can get as good fertility by means of the 

 incubator as by a sitting hen. I hope so. 



THE WRIGHT BROTHERS AND THEIR FLYING- 

 MACHINES UP TO DATE. 



I can not go into details just now, because 

 there are so many of the Wright machines, 

 and so much is being done with them all 

 over the world. Rut as we go to press, no- 

 tice comes in the pajiers that one of their 

 pupils has made a flight of something over 

 (lOOO feet, or over a mile in height, as you 

 will notice. When first making their ex- 

 periments, if I remember correctly, the 

 brothers did not expect to be able to reach 

 any great height — nothing like that reach- 

 ed "by a gas balloon, for instance; but it now 

 transpires they they can reach an altitude 

 of at least a mile; and it may transpire there 

 will be greater safety at a considerable dis- 

 tance above the earth. Perhaps we had 

 better wait a little and see. And I predict 

 and firmly believe w^e shall "see" with our 

 own eyes very soon the aeroplanes gliding 

 over our heads amoiig the clouds. 



OVER A MILE A MINUTE. 



Aside from the above we learn from the 

 Plain Dealer of July 11 that Leon Morane, 

 at Rheims, has just" broken the record by 

 making a speed at the rate of a little more 

 than OS miles an hour. The paper does not 

 state what aeroplane was used, but I pre- 

 sume it is one of the patterns of the Wright 

 Itjrothers, 



