Home made 'Hunny' for a Grounded Bumblebee.

 I found a bee on our garden path this morning. It didn't seem to want to move, and we wondered if it might just be exhausted from the very hot dry weather we've been having as it looked in good condition, clean and fluffy with no visible mites on it or ragged edges to its wings, so it didn't look particularly old or run down.

  Apparently, grounded bees found in the middle of summer are most likely to be males who have either got cold (not today) or been so busy patrolling that they have forgotten to feed themselves.

We decided to get him something to eat and see if that helped. I fetched a bottle lid full of home made vegan lavender 'hunny' (made by me from boiled parsley and sugar and lavender flowers) and stood the bee on some cardboard so he could reach- and he loved it! He drank and drank, and seemed more alert and walked about a bit but still didn't fly off.

 We gave him some homeopathic  Arnica, (you can buy Arnica as well as a lovely honey substitute called 'Sweet Freedom' in our shop at www.veganation.co.uk ) dissolved in water, to drink and after that he seemed much livelier and started vibrating his wings but he still didn't take off. In the end, he stayed all morning and into the afternoon; we gave him another drink of 'hunny' and then another dose of Arnica and he became very animated again and looked much more energetic. We had to go and do other things, so we left him in a safe place and kept coming back to check on him. In the middle of the afternoon we went to check and he'd left.

By the way, lots of people ask us why we don't eat honey- oh, so many reasons! We are vegans and we don't want bees to be exploited just so that we can have something nice to spread on our toast.  Honeybees work SOO hard for their honey- it takes a honeybee an average of 150 trips for one teaspoon of honey, and apparently, to gather a pound of honey, bees have to fly a distance equal to more than twice around the world, about 55,000 miles- it just seems so wrong to take advantage of all that hard work which the bees are doing for the benefit of their hive and take their honey,especially when there are so many alternatives including agave syrup, Sweet Freedom, date syrup, maple syrup and golden syrup as well as the option of making your own as I did!

 The other reason that we don't eat honey is that honey is actually bee vomit and we don't eat vomit! You can gussy it up and call it regurgitation if you like but we're still not eating it!