Isn't it annoying when a fly won't stop buzzing around your head? Or even worse, when a tiny gnat actually flies into your ear for a second and you're sure, in that startling instant, that life as you know it is over? Luckily, that moment typically passes in the blink of an eye. But for one woman in Taiwan, a literal blink of an eye led to a small family of bees making a temporary home under her eyelid.
A report broadcast by China's CTS — and set to Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" by someone with an interesting sense of humor — reveals that a 29-year-old woman identified by the surname He had spent a local holiday called Tomb Sweeping Day visiting a relative's grave and tidying up the weeds around the plot. (Heads up: The video at that link shows some disturbing medical footage.) She felt like something had gotten in her eye, but figured it was just dirt and tried rinsing with water.
Although He avoided rubbing her irritated eye, it started tearing excessively, swelling, and causing her a disconcerting level of pain. She went to the hospital the next day, where the head of ophthalmology found not the assumed infection, but bees. Bees, y'all. "I saw something that looked like insect legs, so I pulled them out under a microscope slowly, and one at a time without damaging their bodies,” Hung Chi-ting, He's doctor, said during a press conference. Ultimately, he found and removed four living, wiggling Halictidae, also known as sweat bees, which had been subsisting on He's tears.
According to The Washington Post, sweat bees need pollen and nectar to survive; however, unlike other bees, they tend to nest near graves and supplement their diets with salt, like the kind found in sweat and tears. But despite hanging out at cemeteries and feeding on the physical manifestation of human sadness, flying into people's eyes apparently isn't really their M.O. (Oh, so they're polite tear-vampire goth bees.) In fact, Hung called this case a "world's first."
Other experts agree. Matan Shelomi, associate professor of entomology at National Taiwan University, told The Washington Post that this kind of sweat-bee behavior is unheard of and that they don't usually look to humans as a salt source. And when I reached out to ophthalmologists to get expert advice on what to do if you think you might have small bees in your eye socket, they were understandably like, WTF? "I’m sorry but I don’t know what to say about this," Kendall E. Donaldson, professor of clinical ophthalmology at the University of Miami, told me. "That is bizarre and I’ve never heard of anything even remotely like this before." I think that makes several million of us.
Although sweat bees are very common all over the world — including the U.S. and especially in Florida, where I live but suddenly no longer want to — Terminix says they typically do not pose a threat unless they feel attacked, rarely even landing on people for a quick sweat shot, let alone making a beeline (sorry) for your eye. But needless to say, if you think you have any foreign objects in your eye — living or otherwise —be sure to see a doctor as soon as possible.
Other eye horror stories, because why not?
- A Woman's Contact Lens Was Found Embedded in Her Eyelid 28 Years After She Thought She Lost It
- What to Know About Parasitic Eye Worms
- A Model Lost Her Sight in One Eye After a Botched Eye Tattoo Procedure
Now check out 100 years of illegal beauty products:
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