PREPARING FOR WINTER. 1 23 



sets them out where grass and weeds soon almost 

 stop up the entrances, allows them to swarm so 

 much as to weaken every stock, and then to go into 

 winter quarters with insufficient and inferior stores. 

 They nearly all die in wintering. Then he com- 

 plains of his " poor luck." But of course there was 

 and is no luck about it. It was foreordained from 

 the foundation of the world that bees so kept should 

 die in winter. Suppose a cow were kept in an open 

 ,yard during the snows and zero blasts of December, 

 with only a hundred pounds of hay for the month, 

 would she not be dead long before the month was 

 past ? Would any body say her death was due to 

 " poor luck ? " Would not everybody condemn her 

 owner as a foolish and inhuman man ? If fifty cows 

 were tied in a small un ventilated stable, fed only a 

 meagre amount of spoiled hay each day, and al- 

 lowed to wallow for months in their own filth, many 

 of them would surely die before spring, and if any 

 survived, they would be but walking skeletons. 

 Horses, cows, pigs and sheep keep in fat and 

 healthy condition through the winter, when their 

 keepers obey the laws that control the lives of the 

 animals. These laws demand that the animals shall 

 have good food, good shelter and good ventilation. 

 If these conditions are not complied with, the ani- 

 mals will die, or come out sickly in the spring, yet 

 nobody says they die because of the owner's " bad 



