Squish ?

Getting home from shopping in town, just in time to avoid being drowned in a torrential shower, I didn't even look out of the window for about 20 minutes.

When I did it was to discover that one of my climbing roses has been almost totally denuded of flowers by the heavy rain.

As  soon as it stopped, I splashed warily up the garden to see if I could rescue any branches with buds still to open, by tiying them securely to the arch they were supposed to be climbing.

Arms scratched by thorns clothes soaked by wet foliage I saw out of the corner of my eye what I thought was a big spider.

Since I am an arachniphobe of the first water I hastily stepped back a yard or two watching the 'thing' to see what it would do.  What it did was to shake itself vigorously and re-settle on its leaf when I saw it was in fact a very large bumble bee.

Even had it been a spider I would not have squashed it - I never kill anything if I can help it- but since it was a bee this was suddenly a whole different ball-game.

All my life i have hated and feared spiders  while loving all bees, particularly bumble bees.  I am not and never have been a Buddhist but have an aversion to killing, and even horrible insects like blue-bottles get evicted rather than squished.  Bees on the other hand have been aided in all their weirder activities even when attempting to swim (for which they are ill-equipped), often by active rescue.

This morning's velvet-coated visitor was soaked and was visibly having difficulty clinging to the leaf he was perched  on, so I lifted him very carefully, index-finger one side, thumb the other of his soggy little body and placed him on a much larger leaf.

Whether or not this was where he wanted to be mattered not a jot, rescue he needed, and rescue he got!

Am I alone in this extremely biased behaviour to the other inhabitants of our world, or are there other loonies out there?