“He had bees inside of him, and they suctioned bees out of him until Sunday morning,” Austin Bellamy’s mother Shawna Carter told a local news station of her son
An Ohio man who was stung by bees around 20,000 times and ingested about 30 of them while cutting tree branches last week is expected to recover, according to his family.
The incident occurred when Austin Bellamy, 20, climbed a tree Friday morning to help a friend trim its branches before he accidentally cut into a nest full of African killer bees, his mother Shawna Carter wrote on a GoFundMe page established to help with his medical expenses.
Africanized honey bees, according to research from the United States Department of Agriculture, “are more defensive, stinging more with less provocation than other honey bees.”
According to WCPO-TV, Carter said that the Ripley Fire Department informed her that the bees were killer bees. According to the outlet, a Southwest Ohio Beekeepers Association representative said a bee sample would need to be analyzed to identify the species.
Fox affiliate WXIX-TV reports that his grandma Phyllis Edwards and his uncle Dustin Edwards saw the incident. “I was going to try and climb the ladder to get to Austin… but I couldn’t get to him because I was surrounded by bees,” Phyllis told the outlet.
“He tried to anchor himself down, and he couldn’t,” she added. “He was hollering, ‘Help! Help me! Help!’ And nobody would help him.” Before being sent to the hospital for treatment, Bellamy was saved by Craig, a firefighter from the Ripley Fire Department, the outlet claims.
According to WXIX-TV and WCPO-TV, Bellamy came out of a surgically-induced coma on Wednesday night at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
As per People, Bellamy is anticipated to recover completely according to the outlets. Bellamy’s family has been contacted by PEOPLE for comment.
Recalling the moment when she received the news about her son, Carter said she passed out, telling WXIX-TV, “It was just too much for me to take.”
