A 20-year-old man from Ohio is battling for his life after being stung “at least 20,000 times” by bees and ingesting some of them.
Austin Bellamy was trimming branches of a lemon tree with his grandmother and uncle on Saturday, 27 August, when he accidentally cut into a beehive.
“When he started cutting them, that’s when the bees came out, and he tried to anchor himself down, and he couldn’t,” his grandmother Phyllis Edwards told Fox19.
“He was hollering, ‘Help! Help me! Help!’ And nobody would help him.”
Mr Bellamy was in a medically-induced coma till Wednesday and is currently on a ventilator, his family said.
His grandmother and uncle Dustin Edwards were standing on the ground but failed to help him due to their own fear of being attacked by the bees.
“I was going to try and climb the ladder to get to Austin... I seen how high he was... but I couldn’t get to him because I was surrounded in bees,” Ms Edwards added.
Shawna Carter, Mr Bellamy’s mother, said in an online fundraiser that her son “cut right into a nest of African killer bees and was stung over 20,000 times”, and is on a “ventilator fighting for his life”.
She said her son had ingested nearly 30 bees during the attack “and they suctioned bees out of him until Sunday morning”.
“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," Ms Carter said, adding that she fainted upon hearing about the incident.
Ms Carter expressed her gratitude to a Ripley firefighter named Craig, who saved her son. “He’s Austin’s angel”.
African killer bees, whose venom is more dangerous than their regular counterparts, usually sting people when they feel threatened. A single sting can reportedly cause pain and itching.
