Bee careful: Man stung over 400 times; man, hive saved

SAN ANTONIO (WOAI/KABB) — A Texas man was stung more than 400 times by honey bees.

"Bee wranglers" with the American Honey Bee Protection Agency removed and relocated a colony of bees from an abandoned boat in a wooded area in San Antonio on Thursday.

Hector Ramirez, a real estate agent, was stung by the bees on May 2 while he and his father were clearing land with a tractor.

I took off my hat, started swinging it away, and when I turned around, a cloud of bees was in front of me," Ramirez said. "They were hitting me so much that at a certain point when I was getting away from the property I just shut down. I fell to the ground and my dad tried to take me away from the bees, but we were still fighting the bees.

His dad called 911, and Ramirez was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where he'd spend the next six hours recovering. When he got home, he showed his wife all his stings. "She started counting them, and there were over 400," he said. Two weeks after his attack, Ramirez says he feeling better but must now carry an EpiPen.

He soon learned about the American Honey Bee Protection Agency, a nonprofit run by Walter Schumacher. Known as the Bee Czar, Schumacher spent much of Thursday afternoon with a partner getting all the bees out of the boat.

The amount of bees that are coming in and out of here is large enough to kill a man," Schumacher explained. "We're going to cut their entire hive out, move their hives into our boxes and then take the boxes to our property. And hopefully, they stay around and make honey with us.

Schumacher said they're busier than ever due to all the referrals they get from the City of San Antonio. "If you call 311 or 911 here in Bexar County, they give you our direct number," Schumacher said. "So I'm getting 3 to 5 calls every day. And we're getting to at least half of them." As a nonprofit, they don't charge their customers for their services, but instead ask for donations, he explained.

The AHBPA says honey bees pollinate more than 100 types of crops across the United States, so their nonprofit is dedicated to protecting and preserving the country's bee population.

"Without the honey bee, the state of Texas could lose billions of dollars in agricultural production, not to mention the ecological detriment of losing a keystone species." said the non-profit in a statement.