A Jurupa Valley man considers himself fortunate to have survived 200 stings from an angry swarm of bees that he said also injured his son and killed two of his horses.
“I am strong. They could have killed me. The doctor told me it’s a miracle that I’m alive,” Antonio Moreno told KABC/7.
The attack happened about 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 9. Moreno said he and his 12-year-old son were feeding their four horses when his son told him that bees were stinging one. Moreno said the bees went after him when he untied the horse. Moreno and his son ran, but the bees followed. Eventually, the property owner pulled them inside the house.
Both were taken to a hospital after being treated by Cal Fire/Riverside County Fire Department paramedics.
“Everything began to close up, my throat closed up, and my heart felt like it was going to explode,” Moreno told KABC/7. “My chest hurt so much, everything hurt.”
Firefighters sprayed foam — the same substance used on burning jet fuel — to calm the bees, said Karina Espinoza, a Cal Fire spokeswoman.
Moreno said the bees had not bothered him in the two years they lived beneath the shed where he stored the horses’ food.
Clinton Storer, who owns Inland Empire-based Bee Wranglers Inc., said bees in a hive can be calm, but only for so long.
“They can be really gentle for up to a year, and eventually what happens is … the new queen will mate with an aggressive hive,” Storer said in an interview Wednesday. “So eventually that hive will turn aggressive. Aggressive means that if you just tap on the wall, they will come pouring out and they will want to sting you. It’s bred into them to attack or protect their colony.”
The bees likely saw the horses — “It’s a big, brown or black creature that’s breathing, moving” — as a threat, Storer said.
Bees are attracted to the carbon dioxide that’s exhaled by a person or animal, he said.
“That guy was pretty lucky he didn’t get suffocated,” Storer said.
Storer said anyone under attack should run indoors.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the average person can safely tolerate 10 stings per pound of body weight, meaning that a 150-pound person could theoretically withstand 1,500 stings. Some people, however, are highly allergic to the venom and could be killed by a single sting.
Stingers should be removed with the edge of a credit card or by scraping them with a fingernail, the USDA said. Do not use tweezers because they could force more venom into the body.
From 2011 to 2021, 788 people in the United States died from stings from hornets, wasps and bee stings, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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