389 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, Maech 26, 1861. 
grow tliin and even die of grief. He is careful of the little 
ones, and he can be left without danger to live in company 
with them. The Angora is endowed in an extraordinary degree 
with the love of society. The young are never ill-treated by 
the old, and the young have a great respect for the aged; and 
the grandfather exercises patriarchal authority over his sons, 
grandsons, and great grandsons. 
It must be particularly remembered that this race is brec 
for its long silky fur, that the old furnish it more abundantly 
than the young, and that their skin as fur is more valued. 
In France their silky fur is combed every second month, or every 
third at least: and as this operation makes them chilly, they above 
all other races should have warm lodgings, with bedding more 
abundant and clean to shelter them. 
From the social character of these Rabbits the breeder will, 
-of course, draw this inference—'that they can be bred in large 
numbers together, as it is done in the village of St. Innocent, 
in Savoy, the account of which, at page 294, we have already 
given.—R. S. S. {To be continued.) 
NEW COMB-BAR. 
It is, I believe,| undoubted that nothing has contributed so 
I much to prevent the general use of bar-hives as the necessity of 
j affixing guide-combs tor the purpose of compelling their in¬ 
habitants to construct their combs in the right direction. 
With the view of obviating this inconvenience, I have con. 
trived a comb-bar of which the annexed 
is a section. It will be perceived that the 
f lower angles of the bar are rounded off, 
whilst a central rib is added of about an 
eighth of an inch in breadth and depth. 
Al l that is necessary to insure the regular 
formation of combs is to coat the underneath surface of the 
central rib of every bar with melted wax # previous to hiving a 
swarm in the box. I tried this contrivance with two artificial 
swarms last year, and found it answer admirably. 
Messrs. Neighbour & Sons, of 127, High Holborn, and 149, 
| Regent Street, London, have named this the “ Woodbury bar,” 
and have, I believe, adopted it in all bar-hives and boxes 
manufactured by them, so that it is likely soon to be pretty 
widely disseminated and tested in different parts of the king¬ 
dom.—A Deyonshiee Bee-keebee. 
HONEY" FOR BREAKFAST DIRECT FROM 
THE HIVE, 
The supers and glasses that I have been accustomed to use 
hold from 12 lbs. to 20 lbs. of honeycomb ; but, irrespectively 
of my own irreconciliation to large supers, I find my bees 
seldom take so kindly to them as they do to some smaller ones 
which I occasionally apply. This, I grant, may be owing to 
local circumstances; for in a midland agricultural county how 
soon the mowers operate on fields of grass, Dutch clover, or 
saintfoin when they come into flower/ and our parks and 
pastures are minus the heather and almost the wild thyme—we 
gain a meagre compensation for them from the blossoms of the 
fruit and forest trees. In Glasgow I may have been taken for 
an idle man, for how long I have stayed to admire those Stew- 
arton boxes filled with beautiful honeycomb, as exhibited in the 
shops for sale! But that was at a season when in Scotland 
all the bees may rush to the hills for the heather-bloom, 
and procure honey to any amount. But let me say to their 
fortunate proprietors, Do not gainsay our humble supers by 
consequence. Consider the distance of flight and labour it 
takes our bees to fill them even. So, with every good wish to 
the systems best adapted to individual taste or convenience, to 
locality and climate, I come now to unfold a conception for a 
breakfast table of quality, for whatever comes there should not be 
so profuse as to appear vulgar; and those parts of the repast 
representing Nature proper, such as fruits and honeycomb, should 
arrive as naturally as possible, which cannot often be said of 
the latter after it has undergone the ordeal of the grocer’s shop. 
In fact, the foreman at Messrs. Fortnum & Mason’s the year 
before last said to me, “ What we chiefly want for our customers 
is, for the honey to arrive to us just as the bees work it, in 
* The readiest mode of doing this is by inverting a heated flat iron 
between a eouple of bricks, and a little wax having been melted on its 
surface, the centre of the bar should be slowly drawn across the iron. 
glasses, in quantities not exceeding 3 lbs. to 4 lbs.” He might 
have seen as he said it disgust working upon my countenance 
at the dash-smash manner his man was ejecting the honeycomb 
from my glasses. Those combs whose progress I had watched 
to completion, daily admiring the wonderful law which caused 
the little workers instinctively to build them, now soon to become 
exhibited sprawling in a dish, pawed about by profane fingers, 
and ran over by the flies! 
1. Glass 41 inches deep and 41 inches diameter, top and bottom, inside 
measure. 
2. Piece of cork 1 inch diameter, placed in the hole at the bottom of the 
glass when filled with honeycomb. 
3. Stand made of sycamore wood 1 inch thick, 6 inches diameter one 
way, and 7J inches another. 
1. A ring of lead two-eighths of an inch by three-eighths of an inch. 
2. A piece of perforated hat-box kept in its place by the lead. 
3. The honey-glass reversed upon the adapting-board as set to work. 
Well, having to stay in London a fortnight or so last winter, 
I went on the day after my arrival to the Whitefriars Glass 
Works, and was soon in deep consultation about the for¬ 
mation of a honey-glass, upon the model of a small bee-hive, 
board, and alighting-lip, as they would appear blown into one. 
“ Yes, the manufacturer thought the thing could be done.” 
So I left my plan and would call again upon intimation after 
the next “ blowing day,” when I received the following laconic 
epistle, “Sir, your glass is ready.” Yes, but too much like 
the frog in the fable comparatively for my idea. Another 
was made—an improvement, though not my idea yet, and my 
time in town had expired ; so the affair must continue to its com¬ 
pletion through the agency of the post, and will be best developed 
by the following letters :— 
“ Two glasses and covers at 7s. 6d. 
“ Per rail this day. 
“ The price of the above by the dozen would be about 6s. 6d.” 
“ Gentlemen,—There is still the radical fault in the last 
patterns about the rim of the cover. It is too deep, and will 
smash the combs, making them very unsightly. If Messrs. 
Powell could overcome this objection, I would dispense with the 
set-offs and projections around the bottoms of the glasses, that 
being the chief difficulty in then’ formation which adds to their 
expense—so much so, that 6s. 6d. each would prove a prohibitory 
price against selling the honey they are intended to contain. 
Would Messrs. Powell be good enough to send me word what 
flam glasses w’ould cost per dozen—viz., the glasses to be made 
of good substance, and gently bulging, similar to an old-fashioned 
