Cleared for Landing

A couple of nights ago we were sitting quietly watching TV when out of the corner of my eye I saw a rather large dark shape with legs crawling by the fireplace. I leapt up to go and get a large glass and a piece of card to catch what I thought was a huge spider. When I returned hubby was inspecting the intruder which turned out to be a really big bumble bee. It was very slow and dozy even though it was quite warm in the room so we thought it might need some sustenance, after persuading it to crawl in the glass I put some drops of water and a little bit of honey in the glass near the bee. It pounced on the honey and started feeding voraciously, clearly we were right. We watched it feed for a while (well, it was more interesting than the telly actually) and tried to decide what to do with it next. As it was nearly 10pm we didn't want to just put the glass and bee outside in case it got too cold and died, so we built it a little 'house' out of unused small flower pots in a very sheltered part of the garden with a piece of wood for a roof and gap in the front so that it could fly out when it was ready - the things we do for wildlife!! We left the glass and contents inside the little house and returned to the TV in the knowledge that we had done everything we could. When we looked the next morning it was still in the glass feeding on more of the honey so we put the glass into the sunshine and within a couple of minutes the bee flew off, leaving us feeling very pleased with ourselves :-)) I saw a huge bee like this yesterday when I was chasing the orange tip butterfly and again today in roughly the same place, I like to think that it was the bee that we helped coming back to give me a blip - well, you never know :-)))