By Sophia Cardenas
Firefighter/EMT
As soon as the call was dispatched, we knew we’d be dealing with a swarm of bees, but we weren’t anticipating it would be as bad as it was once we arrived on scene.
My lieutenant, Justin Thompson was dispatched with me. When we arrived, we saw a little black cloud hovering over a man at the end of a driveway. He was rolling around on the ground when we found him.
We had our fire gear with us and Justin told me to put my jacket and NOMEX on. Once we did that, we tried to get the guy out of the area. We walked him up and tried to get the bees away, but they followed of course.
I don’t want to say that we beat the poor guy — more we were trying to beat the bees off him. Every time I hit him, I apologized but he didn’t care. He said anything we had to do to get the swarm away from him — do it.
It was an effective technique in getting the bees off of him, but not away from us so eventually the engine crew came and our captain grabbed him and ran with him pretty fast around the other side of the cul-de-sac to attempt to lose the swarm.
I drove the ambulance around to meet them at the end of the block and we put him in the back of the unit. He still had some bees on him, but we were ok with the amount because he had to get to the hospital as soon as possible. We obviously couldn’t stay on scene.
My lieutenant treated him in the back as if he was to go in anaphylactic shock — sometimes that can happen to people even if they’re not allergic to bees if they’ve been stung multiple times. He never did go into shock, but it’s part of our protocol to make sure if something were to happen, there would already be something in his system to control it.
Once we got to the hospital they had to put him in the showers to make sure he didn’t have any bees left on him. He had long-ish hair and a few were matted in there. Later, the hospital crew pulled a bee out of his ear. I think that was the last one they found on him.
It was amazing because throughout the whole ordeal, the man was really calm. Never once did he panic or raise his voice. I learned that he was discharged a couple of days later.
A few bees got in my mask and stung my face. At the time I guess I had a lot of adrenaline running through me so I was never scared. I remember getting stung as a kid and it was terrible, but getting stung this time wasn’t so bad. Maybe as an adult your pain tolerance goes up? The only thing I was upset about was that afterwards it looked like I had two pimples on my cheek where the stings were.