80 



We have glass windows on either side of the door to let in sunshine. 

 The chicken go down through a hole in the floor in the front of the 

 house. 



An interesting advantage in this house is that we use it the year 

 round. Most of the brooding systems can only be used about three 

 months of the year. The chickens soon outgrow them and they must 

 thereafter roost in trees unless we provide a house especially for 

 them. This house provides shelter for the chickens as well as brood- 

 ing them, and you can use these houses all the winter season as lay- 

 ing houses. We have about thirty of them. We put twelve to fifteen 

 hens in each house and carry over winter about three hundred and 

 fifty more hens than we otherwise could, which is an important item. 

 In the spring of the year when hens are running out on free range 

 and have lots of room, we simply double up the flocks in the large 



Figure 29. 



pens and use the colony houses again to rear chickens. Here (Fig. 

 29) is an interesting development in the brooding system. For ten 

 years we have been using these houses singly all winter long with 

 twelve or fifteen hens in a house, and it never occurred to us until 

 last fall that we could. just as well connect up these houses in series 

 and let the hens run together, as shown (Fig. 29). By this device of 

 letting three flocks run together, all roosting in one house, all eating 

 in another house and all laying in the other house, we save two-thirds 

 of the labor of caring for three flocks. 



One point in connection with this colony house is that the saving 

 in labor in feeding large flocks of two hundred to three hundred 

 chickens, as compared to rearing chickens in four, eight or twelve 

 small flocks of twenty-five to fifty each. We actually save many times 

 the labor of feeding, watering, heating, cleaning and doing all of the 

 labor of looking after these chickens. One who has ever had the ex- 

 perience of rearing 1,500 to 2,000 chickens in these little brooders 

 and lugging feed cans, pails of water, cans of kerosene and getting 



