Ohio Man Who Suffered 20,000 Bee-Stings Expected to Recover, Family Says

[appalachiablue]

- The Guardian, Sept. 2, 2022.

Austin Bellamy has awoken from a medically induced coma after mistakenly cutting into a bees’ nest while trimming a tree.

An Ohio man who was stung at least 20,000 times by bees – and even ingested some of the insects – during a mishap while he was cutting tree branches is expected to recover, according to his family. Austin Bellamy, 20, climbed high into a lemon tree in Ripley, Ohio, last Friday to help trim it when he mistakenly cut into a bees’ nest, his mother, Shawna Carter, has recounted, in addition to authorities’ accounts of his injuries.

“When he started cutting them, that’s when the bees came out, and he tried to anchor himself down, and he couldn’t … He was hollering, ‘Help! Help me! Help!’ And nobody would help him,” his grandmother, Phyllis Edwards, told the Cincinnati Enquirer. According to Carter, Bellamy was unable to get down from the tree because he was harnessed. Edwards watched from below alongside Bellamy’s uncle as they were unable to climb the ladder since they were also under attack by the bees.

“I was going to try and climb the ladder to get to Austin … I see how high he was … but I couldn’t get to him because I was surrounded [by] bees,” Edwards said. Paramedics and the Ripley fire department responded to the scene and had to cut Bellamy out of the tree. “He was just covered in bees … screaming and yelling, crying for help,” said Carter. “It was just too much for me to take. It looked like he had a black blanket on his head down to his neck, down to his arms.”

Carter said that the fire department told her that the bees were a hybrid of the western honeybee and east African lowland honeybee that is considered much more defensive than other bee varieties. Emergency responders transported Bellamy to the University of Cincinnati medical center by helicopter where doctors discovered that he had also ingested about 30 bees. Pictures posted on social media show Bellamy hooked up to a ventilator with eyes swollen shut and bee-stings covering his head, face and hands entirely...

More, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/02/ohio-man-20000-bee-stings-recover

[Bayard]

1. One of my nightmares

I'm allergic to them.

[appalachiablue]

3. Oh my, please take special care and stay safe!

💙

[Historic NY]

2. Holy Mother of God....

what a hellish nightmare. Too bad they didn't have a water hose around.

[appalachiablue]

4. For real, and why wouldn't the fire dept. truck have & use a water hose I wonder..

[applegrove]

5. My dad used to tell us about african bees coming up from South America.

Then my brother and cousin stepped on a bees nest, got stung, and never heard that african bee story again. Before we kids would speculate that maybe in panama they could stop the african bees. Glad this man will survive. So sorry he went through what he went through.

[Grokenstein]

9. Movies sensationalized the threat. Some people don't even know they arrived years ago.

Irwin Allen's hilariously preposterous The Swarm depicts them as possessing supervenom that can kill with only a couple of stings (and induces hallucinations of giant bees in every victim), but in reality they are just easily triggered and don't know when to quit attacking. (Kind of like trumpniks!) Every so often there'll be a news story about a swarm that takes over a yard or a car and attacks anyone who approaches. Those are the real "killer" bees.

[applegrove]

10. Hopefully people will be more careful now that we know they have arrived.

[appalachiablue]

13. Thanks & the Trumpnik analogy fits.

[appalachiablue]

11. Good on your dad for ending the stories. Glad this man will survive &

I hope he doesn't have serious lasting effects.

My g. grandfather was stung by a nest of hornets or bees once when taking his wife & daughters to church. The nest was in the tree that he used to tie up the horse and wagon. He lost hearing from the incident but still rode his bicycle several miles to work every day for years.

[applegrove]

16. Yes. I stepped in a bush of hornets. I was only stung a dozen times or less. My mom had

anti-histamines at the cottage because i was mildly allergic when i was a young child. I was always smelling flowers and getting stung. Thankfully these african aggressive bees are not heard of often.

[at140]

6. I have survived 300 stings by

Fire ants. Nasty creatures, first it itches then it is on fire then gets infected and itches more.

[appalachiablue]

8. Holy moly, good for you, that's resilience.

[at140]

14. I under-estimated those tiny ants in the beginning

when moved to FLorida. I like doing yard work and landscaping the yard. I was on my hands and knees doing work on ground. Therse ants are tiny but as soon as their nest is disturbed, they swarm out of the mound, and bite on the exposed skin quickly. Before one realizes, there are already dozens of stings. Now I will not work in grass without long rubber boots and gloves, which is torture in hot and humid Florida for 8 months during the year, but the bites are far worse. I have been using hydrogen peroxide on ant bites and it works better than anything else like that triple anti-biotic ointment.

If you saw pictures of my infected ant bites on legs, it looked worse than monkeypox!

[appalachiablue]

17. Tx, I'm going to remember this, when younger I did a lot of

gardening and never wore gloves although I saw people a bit older who did use them. Now I know why and how lucky I was to have never encountered a serious insect attack.

[Grokenstein]

7. "even ingested some of the insects"

Yeppers. Bees target heat sources when they're on the attack. They go for your mouth and nostrils.

[appalachiablue]

12. Yep, aim for the face openings, likely the case w my ancestor, # 11.

[at140]

15. The wasp went for my ear lobe when I was

on a ladder painting 2nd floor trim on our condo building. I had one hand holding the tall ladder, other hand holding paint brush. The fucker kept stinging my ear lobe until I swatted him with the wet paint brush. My ear swelled up like a tomato. Luckily I am not allergic to bee stings.

[appalachiablue]

18. Poor thing, like a tomato!