The Natural History of Selborne

The backward wheat is in beautiful bloom: the fields look quite white with blossoms.  The forward wheat is out of bloom, & therefore from the late weather not likely to be so good.

Ricked the St foin: it lay 12 days washed with continual showers, & yet is not quite spoiled.

Bees swarm by heaps.  31 swifts appear: so that if near half of them are not strangers the young broods are out.

A swarm of bees has hung-out in a torpid state for many days.

Rain, rain, rain.  Bees cluster round the mouth of one hive; but cannot swarm.  Bees must be starved soon, having no weather fit for gathering honey no sun, nor dry days.  A swarm of bees, which had waited many days for an opportunity, came-out in a short gleam of sunshine just before an heavy shower, between 3 & 4 in the afternoon, & settled on the balm of Gilead-fir.  When an hive was fixed over them they went into it of themselves.  The young swallows that come out are shivering, & ready to starve.

Winter-like: we are obliged to keep fires.

My st foin lies in a rotting state. Birds are very voracious in their squab state, as appears from the consequences of eating which they eject from their nests in marvelous quantities: as they arrive so rapidly at their full maturity, much nutrition must necessarily be wanted.

New moon.  The vines begin to blow.  They blowed in 1774 June 26: in 1775 June 7: & in 1776 June 25.

Some laboureres digging for stone found in an hole in the rock a red-breast’s nest containing one young cuckow half-fledged.  The wonder was how the old cuckow could discover a nest in so secret, & sequestered a place.

The pair of martins that began their nest near the stair-case window on June the 21: finished the shell this day.