A woman in Taiwan who checked into a hospital complaining of intense eye pain was found to have four live bees inside her eye, feeding off the salt and water in her tears.
An eye doctor who examined He discovered there were four small sweat bees wriggling around on the inside of her eyelid.
The doctor told a news conference that the bees had been feeding off the woman’s tears.
Weeding a Grave
The woman had reportedly been out pulling out weeds from around the graves of relatives as part of the Chinese Qing Ming tomb-cleaning festival.She told reporters a gust of wind blew something into her eyes, and she thought it was dirt. She flushed the area with water, she said, and out of fear she might damage her contact lenses, the woman avoided rubbing her eyes.
Hong told the BBC she was lucky not to have rubbed her eyes because that may have caused the bees to release venom, leading to blindness.
“She was wearing contact lenses so she didn’t dare to rub her eyes in case she broke the lens. If she did she could have induced the bees to produce venom... she could have gone blind,” Hong said, according to the report.
Hours after the insects flew into He’s eyes, discomfort turned to pain. The following day it became so intense, she sought medical attention.
“She couldn’t completely close her eyes. I looked into the gap with a microscope and saw something black that looked like an insect leg,” Hong told the BBC.
“I grabbed the leg and very slowly took one out, then I saw another one, and another and another. They were still intact and all alive.”
Close-up images of the bees embedded in the woman’s eyes were shown on Taiwanese TV.
First Case Ever?
Hong told the BBC he believes this is the first case in Taiwan of sweat bees infesting someone’s eye socket.Matan Shelomi, an associate professor of entomology at National Taiwan University, told The Washington Post that this may, in fact, be the first time in recorded history such an incident has ever occurred.
“To my knowledge, this is the first case of a bee or a wasp getting caught in a part of a person’s anatomy, as far as I know,” he said, The Post reported. “I’m sure the sweat bees got by the eye and got squished between the eye and eyelid. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
‘Tiny Spark’ versus ‘Walking Over Flaming Charcoal’
According to the Missouri Department of Conservation, sweat bees are not aggressive.A bullet ant, ranked at the highest pain threshold of 4.0+, is said to cause “pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.”
“Hot and smoky, almost irreverent,” the pain index states. “Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”