Damn.

I was anticipating learning how to build a house for bats and encourage them to live in it.

I’m not entirely sure why but I feel I could do with some bats around my home — possibly because I used to like watching them flitter about when I was a kid but don’t see so many of them any more, because … like everything else these days, it seems … they’re endangered.

I saved a bumblebee and a wild honeybee from a watery doom this weekend though — saw each of them struggling as I looked out the kitchen window on two occasions … which is something of a miraculous coincidence, I think (at least for the bees anyway 😀).

I hope the bumblebee was alright. They’re often in the throes of dying when you find them wandering, rather than bumbling, about … let alone having fallen into a water tray from a plant pot above … but, what with the cold and the rain, maybe it was looking to dig itself a hole in one of the plant pots, in which to hibernate and simply fallen off ¹.

I put it on the soft earth in the remains of the pot that cracked during the last cold snap — not perfect but easier to dig into, if that’s what it was looking for … and at least it could walk away from it, if it wasn’t.

And it was very uplifting to see the honeybee fly away later after wiping itself dry.

I’m gonna have to look into making some kind of bee-house for both types of bee — they’re all too rare these days as well.

Oh, well … perhaps you’ll write about the other kind of bat house some other time. I shall keep an eye out, just in case, but, if you do, perhaps you’d be so kind as to draw my attention to it by mentioning me — I’d hate to miss it.

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¹ I’d empty the tray, but I get the impression the toad likes it. Also, although I haven’t seen one in a couple of years now ² there used to be a hedgehog that came down the garden to drink out of it and I may only not have seen it because I haven’t been hanging around the kitchen door at 2am to 3am. So, I’m loathe to upset the natural order of things — toads and hedgehogs are pretty endangered these days as well!

² Maybe one of the foxes got it.