This is going to sound like a La Llorona-type legend that your abuela would tell you, but it actually happened. The terror is real! What happened is that a woman in Taiwan who was suffering from a swollen eye with pain and constant tearing went to the doctor and found out that she had four bees under her eyelid. Yes, bees!
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The type of bees that were in her eye are called sweat bees, and they are tiny, which is why she couldn't see them. They were feeding on her tear ducts. Ewwww, right? If you're wondering how this could happen, keep reading.
How could four bees fit in someone's eye?
Sweat bees are tiny and measure only about 3 to 4 millimeters in length. They feed on nectar and pollen, but they are also attracted to human sweat because of the moisture and salts it contains.
Flushing her eye with water didn't help at all.
The woman who suffered from this–identified only by her family name, which is He–had no idea that she had insects in her eye. She thought she had sand in her eye and tried to flush it out with water, but that did not help at all.
"It was very painful. Tears wouldn't stop coming out of my eye," He said at a press conference, according to CNN. "I was scared to death."
Thank goodness she went to the doctor.
The pain became so strong that He went to Fooyin University Hospital in Taiwan, where Dr. Hung Chi-ting, head of the ophthalmology department, removed the insects carefully.
"I saw something that looked like insect legs, so I pulled them out under a microscope slowly, and one at a time without damaging things inside," Hung Chi-ting said. The insects were identified as sweat bees that were feasting on the moisture and salt coming out of He's tear duct.
It could have been so much worse.
Because He went to the hospital promptly and didn't excessively rub her eye, she is expected to make a complete recovery, but it could have been so much worse.
"Thankfully she came to the hospital early, otherwise I might have had to take her eyeball out to save her life," Dr. Hung said. Can you imagine?!
But how did the bees even get into her eye?
He believes that she got the bees in her eye when she was visiting a relative's grave site, which makes sense because sweat bees "nest near graves and in fallen trees," according to Dr. Hung.
