Rachel Wise: It's the little things that really bug me

Rachel Wise.

I walked down my daughter's driveway with two coffees, a cordless drill and a special request.

"Can you please remove the preying mantis from my face?" I asked her. "My hands are full and I can't shoo it away."

If I was expecting immediate aid I was asking the wrong person.

Instead of reaching for my spindly green assailant she reached for her phone.

"Hold still while I take a picture," she said.

The mantis had clambered on to my glasses and was staring balefully into my left eye. I hadn't seen it arrive and wasn't sure how it got there, and according to my daughter when she eventually got around to helping, it wasn't in any hurry to leave.

"It's hanging on," she told me. "It thinks it's caught you and that I'm trying to steal its prey."

That wasn't a comforting thought.

It seemed it was my week for being bugged.

I'd already crawled about under a desk at work trying to coax a misplaced cricket into a jar so I could put it outside where it should have been in the first place. Then minutes after I'd returned to my desk I'd had to retrieve the jar and remove a medium sized caterpillar from my computer mouse pad.

Yes I know most would have flattened them but when it comes to bugs I prefer that their insides stay on the inside. They are more portable that way, rather than smeared.

The only things I actively squash are white tailed spiders and wasps, and even then I have to shut my eyes and chant "yuck, yuck, yuck" while I do the squashing.

I'm not really sure if white tails are dangerous or just victims of bad press, but I'm not willing to find out.

Wasps, however, deserve their icky reputation and all the squashing they can get.

As a kid I was a stranger to shoes and thus no stranger to bee stings. I alternated swollen itchy stung feet with grazed knees and stubbed toes, just for variety, but at least the bees only stung me once.

I didn't get stung by a wasp until some years later. I'd learned to wear shoes so the wasp stung me on the finger instead and I watched in horror as it kept on stinging until it got bored with being waved around and yelled at, and it flew off.

I didn't trust wasps after that, so a couple of weeks later when one landed on a school friend during art class I rushed to save her.

I took to that wasp with fury and a wooden ruler. I bashed it repeatedly and when it wouldn't let go I swung my ruler like the sword Excalibur and chopped the wasp off her hand.

My friend was hugely traumatised. Not by the wasp sting. She said she had, on the whole, preferred the wasp sting to being attacked with a ruler.

On the whole, though, I like to let bugs go on their merry way, so long as it is in the opposite direction to me.

So the spiders living on the wing mirrors of my Jeep are perfectly safe with me. Despite that, my hairstylist saw the state of my be-webbed vehicle recently and assured me she'd have to burn it rather than drive it.

And the ants in the Jeep's centre console aren't a problem, even if they did get into the grandkids' jellybeans, causing much wailing from the back seat. Kids don't need that much sugar anyway.

Yesterday's bumble bee proved a bit of a tricky one, given that it was floating in the toilet bowl and, well, you know.

I wasn't sure it was alive. A dead bee would have been quite a simple proposition but I couldn't possibly flush a live one.

I stared at the bee for a bit, ascertaining that it was alive and doing a lazy breast stroke. I would have to fish it out.

I was in the kitchen ransacking the cutlery drawer for a slotted spoon when my husband asked what was doing.

"There's a bumble bee drowning in the toilet bowl," I told him "and I am going to rescue it."

"Why?" he asked.

"Because bumble bees are important pollinators who fly in windy and cold conditions, thus pollinating more efficiently than honey bees who don't cope well in wind or cold, plus they 'buzz pollinate' which is sort of vibrating when they are in the flower which shakes the pollen loose."

He said he was sorry he asked.

"But if you have to rescue it, must you use a kitchen implement?"

I said yes I did.

I saved the bee and in view of where it had been I didn't attempt mouth-to-mouth. I just flung it out the toilet window, quickly followed by the spoon.

I'm hoping it survived the fall and is out there putting in a good word for me.