824 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Nov. 15. 



ver. I suppose the locality and season may 

 have something to do with it ; but wherever I 

 have found large areas of sweet clover, so that 

 the honey was unmistakably from that source, 

 both comb and extracted honey have been 

 beautiful in appearance, and so luscious to the 

 taste that I have called it equal to any made 

 anywhere. Possibly a sample of sweet-clover 

 honey uot fully ripened might be disagreeable. 



MV CHICKEN STORY ; ALSO SOMETHING ABOUT 

 LIFE-LIKE PHOTOGRAPHS, ETC. 



One of the pleasautest features of that 

 bright home paper, the Rural Nezu-Yorker, 

 is its beautiful and instructive cuts of rural 

 life. It is not altogether the excellent quality 

 of the cuts, but it is the happy selection of 

 subjects and the artistic way in which they 

 are presented; and when we consider that this 

 high-toned family paper is sent once a week 



A YOUTHFUL HKN MOTHER. 



for only a dollar a year, it seems too bad that a 

 single family in our land should be deprived 

 of its beneficial influence. One of its hap- 

 piest efforts in a recent number is a picture of 

 a White Leghorn pullet that commenced to 

 lay when she was 4 months and 16 days old; 

 and at the age of 5 months and 21 days she 

 was the mother of a brood of chiokens. I 

 have borrowed the cut; and if our printers 

 bring it out in good shape I hope it will give 

 you a thrill of surprise and pleasure as it did 

 my.self when I first saw it. See above cut. 

 , We clip the following from the Rural as 

 descriptive: 



While we are discussinjj remarkable families of hu- 

 man beings in their relation to agriculture, let us not 



forget the good hen. In the cut is shown a young 

 hen or pullet which will, probably, take the record 

 for youthful productiveness. This hen is a White 

 Leghorn, bred and owned by O. W. Mapes, the elec- 

 tric hen-man. Mr. Mapes tells the following story 

 regarding this "precocious pullet." If any'of our 

 readers have hens that can beat this record, "we shall 

 be pleased to give them an opportunity to exploit 

 their pets in our columns. 



" This pullet was hatched March 6, with 11 others. 

 They were raised in a small brooder in the woodshed, 

 and about April 1.5 they were carried to the middle of 

 a three-acre field to keep them away from the back 

 door, as they were very tame. Here they ran with a 

 flock of about .500 younger ones, all eating from one 

 long trough which was filled with feed as soon as pos- 

 sible after the chicks cleaned it, usually two or three 

 times a day. In Tune she and her ten mates, in com- 

 pany with fifty of the later chicks, were colonized in 

 No. 2 of my small poultry-houses. The surrounding 

 hou-ses were filled with "the other younger chicks. 

 There were no old hens nearer than No. 6 — about 

 thirty rods away. The pullets laid two eggs in No. 2 

 Julv 22, and continued to .gain up to August 10, when 

 they laid eight eggs inside the house. About Augu.st 

 15 I found this pullet in an old box in the rear of No. 

 2, sitting on fifteen pullets' eggs. The soft side of a 

 board was the only nesting-material in use when I 

 found her. I took pity on "her and gave her some 

 machine-shavings at once. .Slie must have been one 

 of the first to commence laj'ing, as on August 27 she 

 hatched out eight as bright-eyed chicks as I ever .saw, 

 of which she is ju.stly proud, as her picture plainly 

 shows. The feed has alwavs been the same since the 

 day she was hatched, except that a little baking-pow- 

 der was added the first few days, and then the dough 

 baked into a sort of balanced-ration bread; otherwise 

 the feed has simply been wet with cold water." 



Perhaps one reason why I like to look again 

 and again at that picture is that, in my boy- 

 hood daj'S, my firs: craze was for poultry. I 

 sent off and bought a setting of eggs, and I 

 was on hand, you may be sure, when the first 

 chicken hatched. I was in such a hurry to 

 feed them to see them eat, that, hadn't my 

 good mother catitioned me, I might have done 

 them harm; and then I watched their devel- 

 opment day by day. I saw every new white 

 feather as soon as it started. Like little pearls 

 they seemed to me; and when the chicks grew 

 older they were so tame I could pick them up 

 at any time and anywhere, and exhibit them 

 to admiring visitors. When the pullets were 

 old enough to lay, with their beautiful red 

 combs and bright eyes, it seemed to me as if 

 the whole face of animated creation presented 

 nothing equal to them. I used to carry them 

 up to the house and show them to mother 

 ev^ery few days, with an exclamation some- 

 thing like this: "There, mother! just look 

 at her ! and only five months old ! isn't .she a 

 beauty ? " When they began to lay it was a 

 question who was the happier — the pullets or 

 their youthful owner. 



I remember of having a half -barrel fixed 

 with a faucet so the water would drip just as 

 fast as my biddies would catch it as it trickled 

 down. Then I had the rain water from the 

 roof of my poultry -house run into this barrel, 

 so you see the thing was sort o' automatic. 

 One day when I was at school something in 

 the rain water got into the faucet and stopped 

 the flow of water. It was a hot day, and the 

 biddies, not being able to catch even a drop 

 from their accustomed faucet, began to make 

 investigations, and climb on top of the barrel. 

 They tilted the boards that had been laid on 

 top, boy fashion, and then jumped in to get a 

 drink. When I got home from school, three 

 or four of my precious laying pullets were 



