AN 80-YEAR-OLD woman from York got an unexpected surprise on her birthday when a giant insect dropped in on her.

Elaine Carrick turned 80 on Saturday and was sitting having her lunch in her conservatory at her home in Burnholme when a giant bee came indoors.

Mrs Carrick had been reading in The Press about the rediscovery of of the world’s largest bee, Wallace's bee, on a tropical Indonesian island, more than 160 years after it was first seen and feels sure that the whopping insect in her home could be related.

She said: "I couldn't believe what I was reading and what I was seeing with my own eyes.

"I was quite calm with it and I touched it.

"It was enormous.

"It landed on the table and then on an ornament I have of a cat.

"I got up to clear my plate and when I came back it had gone, but it was about the size of my thumb.

"It's the first time I've seen anything like it and to have seen it on my birthday was something else."

While Mrs Carrick admitted her bee was very unlikely to be Wallace's bee, she said the timing of her reading the article and the encounter was 'uncanny'.

As previously reported in The Press,Wallace's bee is as long as an adult’s thumb, and not a single one of them had been seen since 1981.

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A team of scientists found a single live female during an expedition to Indonesia’s North Moluccas islands in January.

They filmed and photographed the creature, which is described as being four times larger than a European honeybee.

Named after the scientist who made the discovery, the insect was first seen in 1858 by British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace on the tropical Indonesian island of Bacan.

Several specimens of the bee were next found in 1981, but it had not been seen since until the 2019 expedition.

Clay Bolt, one of the scientists on the expedition, described seeing the “flying bulldog” of an insect in the wild was “breathtaking”.

Eli Wyman, who joined Mr Bolt on the trip, said: “To actually see how beautiful and big the species is in life, to hear the sound of its giant wings thrumming as it flew past my head, was just incredible.”

The trip was supported by environmental group Global Wildlife Conservation, which has launched a worldwide hunt for 25 “lost species”.They include the Fernandina Galapagos tortoise, last seen in 1906, and the Sinu parakeet, last seen in 1949.