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 honey-suckles,
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
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 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 seen first in warm still mornings.
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