RIPLEY, Ohio — An Ohio man has woken from a medically induced coma after his family said he was stung at least 20,000 times by bees, and swallowed dozens as well.
Austin Bellamy had been trimming trees when he accidentally cut into a beehive, his family said.
“When he started cutting them, that’s when the bees came out, and he tried to anchor himself down and he couldn’t,” Phyllis Edwards, Bellamy’s grandmother, who was standing below at the time, told WXIX. “He was hollering, ‘Help! Help me! Help!’ And nobody would help him.”
Edwards told the station that she and her husband were unable to help because the bees were attacking her as well.
“I was going to try and climb the ladder to get to Austin … but I couldn’t get to him because I was surrounded in bees,” she told WXIX.
Paramedics who responded to the scene told USA Today that they took four people injured at the scene to hospitals. Bellamy was then taken by helicopter to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
“(The bees) left stingers like an inch long,” Shawna Carter, Bellamy’s mother, told WCPO. “When I rubbed his head on Friday before they airlifted him here, he felt like he was becoming a porcupine. That is how pokey they were.”
Carter told the station that in addition to the thousands of stings, Bellamy also swallowed approximately 30 bees, saying, “They were actually sucking the bees out of his airways till Saturday night into Sunday morning.”
In an online fundraiser, Carter said the bees that attacked the family are African killer bees. A spokesperson for the South Western Ohio Beekeepers Association told WCPO that a bee sample would be needed to identify the species conclusively.
Doctors said that Bellamy will make a full recovery, WXIX reported.
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