Most guinea raisers allow their breeding stock free range of the entire farm at all times, and this helps to keep the birds strong and vigorous. During the winter the breeders should be fed a grain mixture of corn, wheat, and oats twice a day, and where no green feed is available on the range at this time of the year, vegetables, such as potatoes, turnips, beets, and cabbage, should be substituted. Animal feed is essential to best results and can be supplied by feeding meat scrap or skimmed milk. Given free range, where the supply of natural feed during the winter and early spring is ample, as it usually is in the southern portion of the United States, the guineas can be left to pick up a considerable part of their feed. Free access to grit, charcoal, and oyster shell is necessary throughout the breeding and laying season. Avoid having the breeders too fat, but keep them in good firm flesh.
While guineas can be kept in the best breeding condition upon free range, still they can be confined, if necessary, and satisfactory results obtained. One extensive guinea raiser has confined as many as 45 hens and 15 males in an acre pen throughout the breeding and laying season and been successful. This pen is inclosed with a wire fence 5 feet high and the birds are prevented from flying over by clipping the flight feathers of one wing. Within the pen is a grass pasture with bushes here and there where the hens make their nests by scratching out a bowl-shaped hollow in the ground. The winters being severe, a roosting shed is provided, having a cleated board reaching from the floor to the roosts for the wing-clipped birds to walk up.
Guinea Eggs
As profitable egg producers guinea hens can not compete with ordinary hens, but during the latter part of the spring and throughout the summer they are persistent layers. The eggs are smaller than hen eggs, weighing about 1.4 ounces each, while eggs of the common fowl average about 2 ounces each; consequently guinea eggs sell at a somewhat lower price. There is no special market for guinea eggs and they are usually graded by dealers as small hen eggs. Owing to the natural tendency of the guinea hen to nest in a patch of weeds or some other well-hidden place, many of the eggs are not found until they are no longer fit for market. The shells of guinea eggs are so thick and often so dark that it is difficult to test them by candling, and for this reason, and also because the eggs are small, dealers do not like to handle them. For home use, however, guinea eggs can be made to take the place of hen eggs, and many regard them as superior in flavor. In composition the greatest difference is that the shell is thicker and the yolk makes up a slightly larger proportion of the total egg contents than in the case of hen eggs.
Fig. 4.—Relative size of eggs of ordinary hen (left) and guinea hen (right).
Laying
Guinea hens usually begin laying in April or May, those in the South laying earlier than those in the North. A short time before the opening of the laying period the hens with their mates begin searching for suitable nesting places among the weeds and brush along the fences or in the fields. In this search the male takes as active an interest as his mate, and when a suitable location is found both help to dig out the nest and make it into a suitable shape. Each day as the hen goes to the nest to lay the male accompanies her and remains near by until she comes off. Should anyone approach he shrieks in warning and thus betrays the whereabouts of the nest, which might otherwise be difficult to locate. If several guinea hens are mated with one male they usually all lay in the same nest, but sometimes a hen after mating will wander off by herself to make her own nest. At other times the male bird, after helping one hen to make her nest, will then desert her and pair off with another hen to make another nest.
From 20 to 30 and often more eggs are laid before the guinea hen becomes broody, at which time she can be broken of her broodiness easily by removing the eggs from her nest, when she will soon begin laying again. If not allowed to sit, guinea hens will continue to lay throughout the summer, laying from 40 to 60 and in some cases 100 eggs during the season.