42 PEARCE METHOD OP BEE-KEEPING 



they were so hard to clean. So I thought I would try one 

 of oilcloth and to my delight nothing sticks to it. We throw 

 a little sand or dust over it when ever we clean it off. If 

 you have old wooden boards, by all means cover them with 

 oilcloth. All poultrymen should know of this as it makes 

 easy what used to be a hard job. I use a trowel to clean it 

 with. 



CHAPTER XVII 



How Bees Behave in a Chicken House Where Bees and 

 Poultry Are Kept Together. 



This is a subject about which there is not much known. 

 At least I did not know anything about it till I tried it. I 

 never had heard of anyone trying it, but on the fruit farm 

 our Brown Leghorn Chickens spent a good deal of their 

 time in the bee yard, so much so that I thought seriously of 

 making the bee yard into a run for the poultry. I have heard 

 that bees sometimes sting chickens, but I never saw a case of 

 it, so I do not believe it is prevalent enough to give any harm. 

 Last year we had 30 hens and 6 large colonies of bees 

 together all summer and they did not seem to give any 

 trouble to the hens, and the hens seemed to take well to the 

 bees. The poultry house was 10 feet wide and 18 feet long. 

 It is built across the end of the barn and faces to the east. 

 As we understand, poultry house construction, there always 

 should be one dark side and one very light side for the poul- 

 try themselves so it makes it easy to arrange it for bees 

 after it is built for chickens. The roosts were arranged on 

 the dark side of the house, as they always should be, and all 

 along the front as you see, there is a row of windows and 

 just below these windows we built a shelf 20 inches high 

 and 20 inches broad. The length of the house, and on this 

 shelf the bees are put. This places them high enough to 

 work with well and also they are high enough so the chick- 

 ens can go under this shelf where they have their nests in 

 some unused bee hives, and we hang a curtain down from 

 this shelf and this makes a dark place for the nests, which 

 the hens like. The hens have all the floor space they would 

 have had if the bees were not in and to keep the hens from 

 flying up on the bee hives, we just screen down from the 

 top with 2 inch poultry netting to the edge of the shelf 

 behind the bees. This neting we have in 6 foot lengths and 

 a light bar across the bottom which we hook up to the roof 



