382 The Natural History of Selborne 



were coddled, as it were, on the trees ; so that they 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 substance, 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 evapora- 

 tion, 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 that it falls in the night, because 

 it is always first seen in warm still mornings. 2 



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. 2 Honey-dew is now 

 known to be mainly produced by aphides, which White here incidentally notices 

 side by side with it, without suspecting their causal connection. It is possible that 

 a small amount of honey-dew may be exuded by the plants themselves, but by far 

 the greater portion is undoubtedly due to the secretions of plant-lice. ED. 



