426 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



May 15 



much for him, and the last I heard of him 

 he was groing back to God's country, there 

 to stay. The way he is teleg-raphing- in or- 

 ders for extractors, sections, etc., I assume 

 that he is busier than ever. 



Passing from Los Angeles I made my 

 way up to see J. F. Mclntyre and R. A. 

 Holley, in the vicinity of Fillmore; but ow- 

 ing to the fact that certain of my pictures 

 were not finished, as I supposed, I am 

 obliged to make a jump, and skip these 

 people temporarily, and drop down near 

 Piru City, ne ir which M. H. Mendleson 

 has one of his celebrated apiaries, the 

 Limekiln yard, about half an hour's drive 

 from Piru. This apiary is located, as the 

 name indicates, in the bottom of the Lime- 

 kiln Canyon, or what I termed Rattlesnake 

 Canyon, for Mr. Mendleson's men killed 

 some seven or eight of those reptiles on the 

 mountain-sides before I arrived; and I was 

 constantly reminded to look out and not 

 step on the beautiful pets. 



The apiary as a whole is shown in Fig. 

 1; and of all the picturesque spots for a 

 bee-yard, of the entire six thousand miles 

 of my travels, I do not know of any more 

 beautiful, or one more favorable for the pro- 

 duction of honey, than this one right before 

 us. The celebrated Sespe apiary, belong- 

 ing to J. F. Mclntyre, nearly equals it in 

 its surroundings; but of this I shall have 

 something to say later on. 



I spent three or four days with Mr. Men- 

 dleson, "baching" it with him and his 



men, and how I enjoyed it! The clear brac- 

 ing mountain air gave me an appetite the 

 enjoyment of which I shall never forget — 

 the flap-jacks and other good things that 

 Mendleson's bachelor cook spread before 

 us could fill any "aching void." As the 

 sun went down over those mountains the air 

 would begin to turn cool, though it was al- 

 most July. Sleep! one could roll up under 

 the bed-clothes, shut his ej^es, and. presto! 

 the sun would be smiling over the tops of 

 those mountains again, for I slept late and 

 hard. 



As 3'ou will see by the pictures, I took 

 several strolls with the camera and tripoti 

 over the vicinity. I clambered up, vuihe- 

 known to the boys, with the camera, and 

 the first thej^ saw of ine I was hundreds of 

 feet above their heads. A loud "hello!" 

 warned me to look out for "rattlers," and 

 I did. The tripod that I had was in the 

 form of a pole that could be folded up, mak- 

 ing a very respectable club or mountain- 

 stick. With this I felt reasonably secure; 

 but still I had a nervous fear that I might 

 get bitten. Every now and then I would 

 run into some prickly cacti or Spanish nee 

 die; and before I knew it I would be seized 

 with a creepy horror of "snakes in ni\' 

 boots; " but the real creepy things I neither 

 felt, saw, nor heard. 



The Mendleson apiary is down in the bot- 

 tom of the canyon. The ground was some- 

 what of a side-hill originally, and Mr. 

 Mendleson himself, with a great deal of la- 



FIG. 1. — API.\RY OF M. H. MENDLESON, IN LIMEKILN CANYON. 



