“Killer” bees killed horses and attacked a couple in North Texas on Wednesday. Luckily, as was the case in a “killer” bee attack in Florida earlier this year, no humans were killed—just disturbed, hurt, and shook up.
Kristen Beauregard, 44, was stung about 200 times, and her boyfriend was stung about 50 times by a swarm of some 30,000 bees, she told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The horses, Trump and Chip, were killed. “I watched that horse who trusted me to always, always take care of him and I watched him look up at me in so much pain and thrash around and look at me like–why aren’t you fixing this?” she told CBS. Some of her hens were also killed.
She recalled how the bees chased her, even as she jumped into water to lose them. “It was like a bad movie,” she told the Star-Telegram. The bees are being tested to see if they are Africanized bees, colloquially known as “killer” bees, or if they are honey bees, though their attack appears consistent with those of Africanized bees.
A man in Moody, Texas, was killed by Africanized bees the first weekend of June. He had hit an abandoned chicken coop with his tractor, disturbing 22 hives and some 40,000 bees.
The man, Larry Goodwin, 62, was helped by two women who were stung dozens of times. His daughters, Tanya Goodwin and Kelley Flores, released a joint statement to KCEN: “If anybody has any brush or anything on their lands, please clear it, because they don’t want to go through this. Nobody needs to go through this.”
Beauregard and her boyfriend also urged people to have professionals investigate if there is any suspicion of hives on their properties.
At a Tampa, Fla., park in March, two park workers were attacked by killer bees. Rodney Pugh and David Zeledon were each stung around 100 times by some 100,000 bees; neither died. They had disturbed the hives in a pile of trash as they moved it with a front-end loader.
“It was like a thousand little knives poking me in my body,” Pugh, 41, told ABC Action News.
Allen Miller, the owner of Bees Be Gone, described the threat of killer bees after he was called in to remove the bees from hives that killed Goodwin in June.
Miller told the Waco Tribune-Herald: “They can get up under your clothes where no other insect can go. In a hive of ordinary European bees, about 10 percent will attack if the hive is threatened, but with African bees, all of them attack you.”
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