A 75-year-old man was killed by bees while cutting down trees on his Texas farm.
When the attack happened, Bryce Smith was cutting down trees at his home in Bedias, which is about 80 miles from Houston. The beehive was in one of the trees he was cutting down. The news station KBTX said Smith’s face and neck were stung more than 60 times.
The man was taken home by someone who then called 911. At the scene, the first rescuers said he was dead.
Grimes County Justice of the Peace Precinct 1 Judge Chris Acord said, “The Bedias community lost a very, very good person yesterday. A very good man.” “He was a great husband, dad, and grandfather to his children and grandchildren.” People looked up to him.
The judge told the people in the area to be careful because there are a lot of beehives there.
“Even though we don’t think about these things, what happened was very bad and could happen to anyone,” Acord said.
Juliana Rangel, a honeybee scientist at Texas A&M AgriLife Research, told the news source that the bees that attacked Smith were probably African honey bees.
“Outside stimuli make Africanized bees a little more likely to feel threatened than European bees do most of the time,” Rangel said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that hornets, wasps, and bee stings killed 788 people each year between 2011 and 2021.
