Dear Darwin,

The cultivation of bees continues among my amusements. Wasps are their enemies and therefore are waged war against. This year I caught quite an unusual number of queens. It is a curious fact that they will readily go into bottles of syrup placed among the bee hives, which the bees, though the contents are the same that they are fed on, very rarely enter. I don’t know how they acquired this wisdom, as this was the first year I followed the plan so the information could hardly have been traditionally conveyed.

Some of the Queen wasps, which are the only ones who survive the winter, commenced to make nests in empty bee-hives, and I observed that the several cells which constitute their foundations were, so far as I could see, perfect hexagons and as well arranged as those of a commenced comb in a hive. This sent me to the “Origin of species”, and it seems to me that this regularity of construction cannot be accounted for in the same way as the work of the bee, as it is the labour of a solitary insect, which does all the early work alone.¹

What a sad harvest it has been in the South! I never heard of a year when the weather was so persistently different in England and Scotland.² We had unusually cold weather all the time the wave of heat passed over you. In consequence our crops, now being cut, are very late, and the appearance of the Skies is not encouraging, but we should not be ill off if it came fine and warm now.

I hope you enjoyed and benefited by your sojourn at the lakes.³

With all our very kindest regards to you and your party | Believe me | Faithfully yours | J Brodie Innes