The Natural History of Selborne

Boys bring me female wasps, & hornets.  Ophrys nidus avis.

Began to cut my st foin; large and much lodged, & full of wild grasses.  The tenth crop.

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.”

Swallows are hawking after food for their young ’til near nine o’ the clock.  They take true pains to support their family.

Wheat begins to come into ear.  A pair of martins began a nest this day over the garden-door.  The brick-burner has received great damage among his ware that was drying by the continual rains.

Tremella nostoc abounds in the field-walks; a sign that the earth is drenched with water.

My building is interrupted by the rain.

From the egg-shells flung-out it appears that young martins are hatched in a nest built last year.  The curcumstance of the ready-built nest makes the brood so much the forwarder.

The ground chops & bakes very hard.

The bees gather earnestly from the flowers of the buck-thorn.  Tho’ we are exempt from chafers this season round this district; yet between Winchester & Southampton they swarm so as to devour everything; the country stinks of them.