The Natural History of Selborne

Kidney-beans look miserably.   A poor cold solstice for tender plants.  Wheat looks yellow.  My bees when swarming settle every year on the boughs of the Balm of Gilead fir.  Yesterday they settled at first in two swarms, which soon coalesced into one.  To a thinking mind few phenomena  are more striking than the clustering of bees on some bough where they remain in order, as it were, to be ready for hiving:

…”arbore summa

Confluere, & lentis uvam demittere ramis.”