Think about that one thing that really freaks you out. Maybe it’s a fear of heights, maybe a fear of flying. Maybe, however, you’re scared of bees living underneath your eyelids?
In quite the freaky scenario, a Taiwanese woman has discovered not one, but four sweat bees living underneath her eyelids. During the country’s annual tomb-sweeping festival, the young woman, only being identified as ‘Ms. He’ was visiting the grave of a relative. While she was pulling weeds, Ms He noticed something had become stuck in her eye.
After attempting her own removal operation, the woman started to feel quite severe pain, after which her eye began to swell. [Ouch!]
In a local news conference, she said, “It was a very intense stinging pain and I was constantly shedding tears, there was a lot of secretion,”
Source: Apple Daily Newsletter
Doctors at Taiwan’s Fooyin University Hospital were baffled after the shock finding. Four tiny bees had made a home under her eyelid. One of the hospital’s staff spoke in a local media conference. “After I pulled them out one by one, I discovered that surprisingly there were four bees,” said Hong Chi Ting. “The size of every single bee was around 0.3 to 0.4 centimetres.”
The small bees are commonly known as sweat bees. They come from a large family of bees known as Halictidae, and are most commonly found in Northern America. They can be identified by their bright metallic green or blue colour. Females are generally a bright green colour, and on the surface, they’re HAIRY. WTF? Males have a bright-coloured head and yellow-and-black striped abdomen.
So, why did they end up in He’s eye? In keeping with their name, not only are the bees attracted to pollen, they will feed on sweaty people and tears, often landing on humans to lick their sweat. Totally gross.
