Four bees found feeding on tears in woman’s eye socket
A TAIWANESE woman got the shock of her life when she sought hospital treatment for a suspected eye infection and doctors extracted four live bees that had been feasting on her tear ducts.
The 29-year-old, identified only by her surname He by Taiwan’s CTS news channel, assumed that sand or dirt had been blown into her eye when it became swollen, streamed with tears and she felt a stinging pain that would not subside.
In what is believed to be a “world first”, doctors at Taiwan’s Fooyin University Hospital described how they had spotted the small insects crawling around Ms He’s eye socket.
Dr Hung Chi-ting, the hospital’s head of ophthalmology, had been expecting to find cellulitis and keratitis, a bacterial skin infection and the inflammation of the cornea.
“I saw something that looked like insect legs, so I pulled them out under a microscope slowly, one at a time without damaging their bodies,” he said. The creatures were identified as sweat bees, which are not normally aggressive or prone to stinging but are attracted to human perspiration and may have been confused by the woman’s tear ducts. Also known as halictidae, they are found all over the world.
Ms He had been tidying a relative’s grave during last week’s Qingming Festival, or Tomb-sweeping Day, when families clean the final resting place of their ancestors. “I was squatting down and pulling out weeds,” she said. Dr Hung said the species nested near graves and fallen trees, adding that the chances of coming across them while hiking in the mountains were high.
Ms He has been discharged and is expected to make a full recovery.