Man dies after Glenwood bee attack

A MAN was killed when he was attacked by a swarm of more than 500 bees in Glenwood on Tuesday afternoon.

Brenton Mills, an estate agent for Wakefields, witnessed the awful incident and is still coming to terms with the tragedy. Speaking to Berea Mail, Mills said he had completed a market evaluation on a home on Princess Alice Avenue and walked out when he noticed the neighbours’ dogs ‘yelping frantically’. “I then noticed the older Indian man. He was standing on the pavement waving his arms around, then he sat on the grass. I went to see what was wrong and as I got closer I saw bees all around him. I got stung twice, once under each eye, and I ran towards the guard hut at the top of the road and shouted for him to run as well, but he seemed disorientated,” he said.

Mills recalled that another neighbour, whom he was familiar with, arrived with her children and he tried to warn her about the bees, but her daughter got out of the car and was stung. “She had to run inside the house to get away. By then, the man seemed to move away from the bees and I saw him walking away from the road, so I thought he would be okay, and I ran across to my car, which was parked on the Pigeon Valley side of the road,” Mills said.

While trying to leave, Mills was greeted by a few more bees that had flown into his car and had to open the windows and drive to get them out. Mills returned to his office and couldn’t get his mind off the attack, so he tried to phone the woman next door. “She her child had been stung and the dogs had been stung as well, although the labrador seemed to be quite clever – I saw he jumped into the pool, but I was also wondering if the man was all right,” he said. When the woman didn’t answer the call, he decided to go back and check and was horrified to learn that after numerous attempts to resuscitate him, the man had died.

“I’m completely shocked and feel terrible about the tragedy. You don’t think in this day and age that someone would die of a bee attack. I just feel so sorry for the family, I wish I could have done something more, maybe asked for a blanket or tried to put him in my car, but these bees were absolutely wild, and there seemed to be between 500 and 1 000 of them,” he said with sadness.