FOREST, FISH AND GAME COMMISSION. 69 



bottom one may rest on the floor; the next one should be twenty inches above 

 the floor, while the two upper ones may be eighteen inches apart, the distance 

 being dependent on the ease with which the cones can be stirred and handled. 

 The tiers should run the whole length of the room, with aisles of suitable width, 

 say two feet and a half wide. The bins should be five feet wide; if wider, it will 

 be inconvenient to reach the middle, and if narrower, there will be too great 

 a proportion of aisle space. For the sides of the bins, inch boards, four or five 

 inches wide, turned on edge, may be used, although the mass of cones should not 

 be over three inches deep. The sides and bottoms should be made of inch boards 

 dressed on one side and jointed on the edges; then any shrinkage of the bottom 

 boards, caused by seasoning, can be taken up by inserting wedges between the 

 upright and the edge of the outer board. No nails are necessary, and the boards 

 can be taken down whenever the space is needed for other work. A tight bottom 

 can also be obtained by using tongued and grooved flooring ("matched stuff'), 

 but the framework cannot be taken down so readily. 



The cones, when brought to the drying-room, were emptied from the sacks in 

 a pile on the floor, where they were shoveled into a half-bushel measure, carried 

 to the racks or bins and spread out to dry, a record being kept of the number 

 of bushels thus handled. For clean cones the measure was taken level full, but 

 when they were not clean the measure was heaped to make allowance for dirt 

 and bits of twigs. "When the cones were very dirty, the leaves, dirt, bark, dead 

 cones and twigs were picked out before measuring. 



Cost of (iatl)ermcr Cones. 



Eleven and one half bushels were received September thirteenth ; fifty-four 

 bushels on the eighteenth ; seventy-two and one half bushels on the twentieth ; 

 thirty-three bushels on the twenty-second; twenty-nine and one half bushels on the 

 twenty-third; total, two hundred and one half bushels. Of this amount one hundred 

 and forty-two bushels were received from the men who picked by the bushel and 

 fifty-eight and one half bushels from the men who worked by the day. 



The cost of the cones obtained from men working by the day was eighty-seven 

 cents per bushel, or twelve cents more than those picked by the job. Good men 

 can easily average six to eight bushels per day when the yield of cones is as 

 large as it was this season. One man, by stripping the cones from the branches, 

 picked twenty-eight bushels in three days. The difficulty is in getting men 

 started, and it was for this reason that the liberal rate of seventy-five cents was 

 offered. In a good seed year fifty cents per bushel would be a sufficient inducement, 



