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No Joking This Time: 4 Men Hospitalized After Bee Attack In California

NPR | By Mark Memmott
Published September 16, 2011 at 9:45 AM EDT

We had a bit of fun Thursday with a story about a 200-pound beehive in Arizona.

This story's nothing to laugh about:

"4 Men Hospitalized In Honeybee Attack." (OC Weekly)

It seems that "thousands of angry bees swarmed a man in a wheelchair [Thursday], sending him and three others who came to his aid to the hospital in the Southern California city of Santa Ana. ... The trouble started at a storage yard when a man in a wheelchair apparently disturbed the hive, causing the bees to bombard him, Santa Ana fire Capt. Steven Snyder said." (The Associated Press, via MSNBC)

The victim in the wheelchair was stung more than 60 times. There were an estimated 60,000 bees in the hive.

Firefighters had to evacuate people in the nearby block while professionals rounded up the bees.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott
Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.
See stories by Mark Memmott
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