400 The Natural History of Selborne 



had no quickness of flavour, and would not keep in the 

 winter. This circumstance put me in mind of what I have 

 heard travellers assert, that they never ate a good apple or 

 apricot in the south of Europe, where the heats were so great 

 as to render the juices vapid and insipid. 



The great pests of a garden are wasps, which destroy all 

 the finer fruits just as they are coming into perfection. In 

 1781 we had none; in 1783 there were myriads; which 

 would have devoured all the produce of my garden, had not 

 we set the boys to take the nests, and caught thousands with 

 hazel-twigs tipped with bird-lime : we have since employed 

 the boys to take and destroy the large breeding wasps in 

 the spring. 1 Such expedients have a great effect on these 

 marauders, and will keep them under. Though wasps do 

 not abound but in hot summers, yet they do not prevail 

 in every hot summer, as I have instanced in the two years 

 above-mentioned. 



In the sultry season of 1783, honey-dews were so frequent 

 as to deface and destroy the beauties of my garden. My 

 honeysuckles, which were one week the most sweet and 

 lovely objects that the eye could behold, became the next 

 the most loathsome; being enveloped in a viscous sub- 

 stance, and loaded with black aphides, or smother-flies. The 

 occasion of this clammy appearance seems to be this, that 

 in hot weather the effluvia of flowers in fields and meadows 

 and gardens are drawn up in the day by a brisk evaporation, 

 and then in the night fall down again with the dews, in which 

 they are entangled; that the air is strongly scented, and 

 therefore impregnated with the particles of flowers in summer 

 weather, our senses will inform us ; and that this clammy 

 sweet substance is of the vegetable kind we may learn from 

 bees, to whom it is very grateful : and we may be assured 



1 These are what are known as "foundress wasps" impregnated 

 queens which struggle through the winter and become mothers of colonies 

 in the succeeding season. The destruction of one such pregnant female in 

 early spring is equivalent to the destruction of an entire nest in summer. 

 ED. 



