370 THE REV, F. A. WALKER, D.D., F.L.S., ON 
room for the operations of both. But if one be captured 
thereat, within a brief space (say ten minutes) another visitor, 
in brown and yellow jerkin, flies up with a sonorous hum to 
take his place, Sometimes, but more rarely, two may be 
seen together seated on one apple. Are these solitary visits 
due to some well understood and defined arrangement 
between themselves ? 
“The present unsettled state of the weather here (sunshine 
alternating with clouds and frequent showers) renders the 
hornets all the more dangerous, as apt to creep about 
noiselessly in a semi-torpid condition resulting from the 
heavy wet. Query, do the queens leave the nest at this 
period of the year? It would seem so, as when my wife 
was in the orchard here a few days since, on picking up a 
fallen apple, she heard a loud buzzing in the grass close to 
the fruit, and in a few moments a hornet ascended a blade 
of grass and flew away. Luckily for herself she did not 
touch it, as at first sight she mistook it for a dragon-fly, and 
from the size which she described it could only have been a 
queen. 
“Of late years I have seen very few hornets in England, 
and during ie whole of my residence in my Cambri dgeshire 
parish I only recall the occurrence of one nest in the roof of 
a farmhouse or cottage three or four doors from the rectory, 
and taken by an elderly parishioner to whom various odd 
jobs were delegated, and commonly supposed to possess a 
very thick cuticle; at any rate, he went about his work 
fearlessly. ‘They do hom so,’ he said. 
“One of the very few occasions on which I have seen a 
queen hornet alive was in the winter season on the drawing- 
room window-sill of the said Cambridgeshire rectory, when 
it was in an almost torpid state, and covered with soot, and 
I naturally dreaded its presence on account of my children, 
who were then very young. I remember in boyhood’s hour 
being greatly diverted at beholding a hornet sweep in its 
fliceht into a’ hole in the side of a lar ge jargonelle pear, and 
no fewer than twenty wasps forthwith to tumble out 
therefrom in a state of the most abject terror to the ground. 
In those days also a relative observed a hornet seated on the 
bough of an apple tree, and tearing a hive bee to pieces for 
the sake of its honey-bag. 
“The hornet does not always score, however, for while two 
English ladies were walking in the environs of Chartres 
(Lake of Geneva) in the month of July, 1893, while I held 
