A Taiwan doctor found four sweat bees living within woman’s eye. The 29-year-old woman believed that she has some kind of severe infection, not knowing what was actually happening. The doctor treated her for inexplicable and enormous pain in the eye at Fooyin University Hospital. Apparently, the bees were living beneath here eyelid and were feeding on the fluids from her tears ducks.
The doctors examined the swollen eye and were able to remove the sweat bees living within woman’s eye. As expected, this procedure is the first of this kind. At first, the doctors assumed inflammation of the cornea. However, after examining the eye with a microscope, Dr. Hung saw the insect’s wriggling legs. In an interview for CTS News, Dr. Hung Chi Ting stated: “I saw something that looked like insect legs, so I pulled them out under a microscope slowly, and one at a time without damaging their bodies”. Dr. Hung Chi Ting is the head of the ophthalmology department in the hospital.
For BBC, Dr. Hung Chi Ting declared he was “shocked” when he pulled the 4 mm insects out by their legs. He says: “She couldn’t completely close her eyes. I looked into the gap with a microscope and saw something black that looked like an insect leg”. He added: “I grabbed the leg and very slowly took one out, then I saw another one, and another and another. They were still intact and all alive”.
As a matter of fact, the doctor pulled out these insects due to their inclination for human perspiration. The bees inside the woman’s eye were the “sweat bees“. “These bees don’t usually attack people but they like drinking sweat, hence their name” – said the doctor for BBC. As the doctor stated, the woman was pretty lucky that she did not rub her eyes. If she did this, she would have killed the bees and caused a more serious injury. According to him: “She was wearing contact lenses, so she didn’t dare to rub her eyes in case she broke the lens. If she did she could have induced the bees to produce venom… she could have gone blind”.
According to the woman, she was tending a relative’s grave and pulling out weed when something flew into her eye. Thinking that it is some kind of grit or dirt, she rinsed her eye with water. By the end of the day, her eye had swollen a lot and the pain was only getting worse. Her eye was running with tears.
Regarding the bees, the doctor said: “They are still alive, they’ve been sent as specimens to another organization and will be studied.” He added: “This is the first time in Taiwan we’ve seen something like this.”
source: www.independent.co.uk