Driving home a couple of days ago after completing a busy gardening day for my customers, windows slightly down drawing in a warm air breeze as it was 28 degrees outside, I heard a ‘click’ noise behind my head.

Unusual perhaps, but didn’t think much of it and continued my driving at the allowed 50mph on a fairly busy countryside road.

Usually things that go click can just be a fly, or more usually a ladybird or beetle as it’s wing casings clatter against something hard as it enters the cab area. Oh no, not this time!

So, continuing my journey, I decided just to have a look around to see what the ‘click’ might have been. When safe and not being distracted with my driving, I micro-secondly scanned the cab area, nope, couldn’t see any bug/insect flying around the windscreen, window or door areas. Nothing!

Left it a little while and looked again only this time I happened to glance down. There it was, a bee! Just a small honey bee enjoying the ride I guess. Happily just sat there, well, as the traffic slowed to a stop, gave me the chance to watch it slowly moving around in a kind of circular motion.

Now I’m not one to panic, the worst it could do was to get annoyed with my driving and decide to sting me. My main concern is that it had decided to locate itself at the top of my left leg, about one inch or 2.5 centimetres from my privates!

Four things I needed to do:-

• stay calm, if I collide with something it will be my fault not the bee’s!
• keep driving until safe to stop ( I knew there was a side road about quarter of a mile away, which under normal 50mph would have been a couple of minutes, however the traffic build up had other ideas and slowed me down to a crawl…bit like the bee!)
• changing gears up and down meaning left leg movement could have really peed the bee off and decided to attack via its own defensive sting mechanism
• observe as best as I could in case said bee decided to ‘explore’ further and disappear somewhere even more risqué, reducing the one inch away to zero! ( I’m so glad I wear long work pants and not shorts for gardening as the bee could have quite easily disappeared to a warmer, cozier place, for the bee, not me of course!)

Phew! Panic over! After a few more minutes of angst, I managed to safely park up and gently open the van door and ‘slo-mo’ got out and found a leaf to coax the bee from my trousers onto the leaf so it could do damage somewhere else.

Now, the moral to this for me is:- ” In times of hot weather, leave widows up and put the air con on!”…now why didn’t I think of that sooner!

now for a cup of T