152 



NATURAL HISTORY 



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 honey- 

 suckles, which were one week the most 

 sweet and lovely objects that the eye could 

 behold, became the next the most loath- 

 some ; 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 efiluvia 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 impreg- 

 nated with the particles of flowers in Sum- 

 mer weather, our senses will inform us ; 

 and that this clammy sweet substance is 



