NATURAL HISTORY OF SELEORNE. 283 



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. 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. 



