300 
NATURAL HISTORY 
where the heats were fo great as to render the juices vapid and 
inlipid. 
The great pefts of a garden are wafps, which deftroy all the 
finer fruits juft as they are coming into perfeftion. In 178 1 wc 
had none; in 1783 there were myriads ; which would have de- 
voured all the produce of my garden, had not we fet the boys to 
take the nefts, and caught thoufands with hazel-twigs tipped with 
bird-lime : we have fince employed the boys to take and deftroy 
the large breeding wafps in the fpring. Such expedients have a 
great effect on thefe marauders, and will keep them under. Though 
wafps do not abound but in hot fummers, yet they do not prevail 
in every hot fummer, as I have inftanced in the two years above- 
mentioned. 
In the fultry feafon of 1783 honey-dews were fo frequent as to 
deface and deftroy the beauties of my garden. My honeyfuckles, 
which were one week the moft fweet and lovely obje£ts that the 
eye could behold, became the next the moft loathfome; being 
enveloped in a vifcous fubftance, and loaded with black aphides, 
or fmother-flies. The occafion of this clammy appearance feems 
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 brifk evapora- 
tion, and then in the night fall down again with the dews, in which; 
they are entangled ; that the air is ftrongly fcented, and therefore 
impregnated with the particles of flowers in fummer weather, our 
fenfes will inform us ; and that this clammy fweet fubftance is of 
the vegetable kind we may learn from bees, to whom it is very 
grateful : and we may be aflTured that it falls in the night, becaufc: 
it is always firft feen in warm ftill mornings. 
On 
