Four bees have been pulled alive from inside a woman's eye - with doctors saying the insects were feasting on her tears.
A Taiwanese woman went to the hospital for what she believed was an eye infection. Doctors treating the woman were shocked to find four tiny bees living under her left eyelid.
According to The New York Times, the patient, identified only by her last name, He, felt a "sharp pain" in her left eye while taking part in the tradition of tomb-sweeping, an annual event to visit the tombs of ancestors to clean their graves and make ritual offerings. She reportedly plucked weeds from a gravestone and rinsed what she believed to be sand from her eyes with water. When she got home, she couldn't stop crying.
"It was very painful. Tears wouldn't stop coming out of my eye," she said. "I was scared to death."
Her eye had become totally swollen shut and the pain was unbearable. The infection seemed to be getting worse.
When He arrived at Fooyin University Hospital in Taiwan, doctors didn’t find a bacterial infection. Instead, while examining He’s eyes through a microscope, the hospital’s head of ophthalmology reportedly found four bees feeding on her tear ducts.
“Under the microscope, I slowly pulled them out, one after another,” Dr. Hung Chi-ting, the head ophthalmologist at Fooyin University, said at a news conference broadcast by local media last week, according to the Times.
The bees extracted from He's eyes are known as "sweat bees" and they're part of the halictid family. They subsist primarily on pollen.
Halictidae is the second-largest family of Apoidea bees. Halictid species occur all over the world and are usually dark-colored and often metallic in appearance.
Pictures of the bees were shown on Taiwanese TV.
The bees could have been blown inside her eye by a gust of wind and found themselves stuck inside.
They also need salt to supplement their diet, so they feed on sweat and tears.
“To my knowledge, this is the first case of a bee or a wasp getting caught in a part of a person’s anatomy, as far as I know,” Matan Shelomi, an associate professor of entomology at National Taiwan University, told The Washington Post. “I’m sure the sweat bees got by the eye and got squished between the eye and eyelid. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“They don’t seem to be bothered by people, so they will go to any source of salt," Shelomi said. "I think they’re kind of dumb if they come to humans for their salt. They haven’t figured out what we are.”
The woman was reportedly discharged and is expected to make a full recovery. The bees extracted from her eyes are still alive and will now be studied.
But what's happened to the bees?
"They are still alive, they've been sent as specimens to another organisation and will be studied," said Dr Hong. "This is the first time in Taiwan we've seen something like this."