A Texas woman trying to outrun hundreds of Africanized honeybees made it across a storage facility with the swarm following her, only to discover that the automatic gate standing between her and the outside world had one problem: it was waiting for a car.
Rachel Kelly-McKee was stung more than 300 times during the Aug. 15 attack at Goose Island Park Storage in Rockport, Texas, according to KRIS reporting carried by News4 San Antonio.
Surveillance video captured Kelly-McKee running around the property, swatting at the bees and trying to escape. Her German shepherd, Chelsea, was also caught in the swarm.
Kelly-McKee eventually reached the facility’s automatic gate, but the system was designed to detect a vehicle rather than a person on foot. With the bees still attacking her, the storage facility’s owner saw what was happening and remotely opened the gate.
A Few Bees
Embedded media follows; please allow a moment to load.
The encounter had started much less dramatically.
Kelly-McKee was at her storage unit with Chelsea, who she said likes accompanying her there. A tree near the unit was home to the bees, and Kelly-McKee said Chelsea may have disturbed them.
When the dog came inside, Kelly-McKee noticed several bees on her.
“And she came in, and I noticed she had a few bees on her,” Kelly-McKee told KRIS. “And so I said, you know, I thought they were honeybees. I said, ‘Don’t bring the bees in here,’ you know.”
Whatever separation the storage unit provided didn’t last.
“The minute we cleared that door, I was just absolutely inundated,” Kelly-McKee said. “And so she ran one way and I ran the other way.”
Kelly-McKee ran around the facility screaming, swatting at the bees, and trying to get them off her as Chelsea went in another direction.
Her escape eventually brought her to the automatic gate.
The facility advertises digital video surveillance, and the cameras that ordinarily watch over stored property instead recorded Kelly-McKee trying to outrun the swarm.
The gate itself required a vehicle to trigger it.
Kelly-McKee didn’t have one with her at the gate.
The facility’s owner remotely opened it after seeing what was happening.
Getting Her Out
Aransas County Sheriff’s Deputy Will Newsom and members of the Lamar Volunteer Fire Department responded to the attack.
Newsom’s plan was straightforward: get Kelly-McKee inside his patrol vehicle and put some distance between her and the bees.
“My plan was to roll up and get her into the back compartment of my car and then extricate her from the scene and move her down to Lamar Fire Station, where we could get medical attention,” Newsom told KRIS.
The Lamar Volunteer Fire Department operates its station on the Lamar Peninsula in Aransas County.
Newsom said the number of stings made getting Kelly-McKee away from the swarm and into medical care especially urgent.
“I mean, one bee sting can be fatal to some people,” Newsom said. “She took over 300 stings, which is definitely in the fatal range.”
Rather than waiting at the scene, Newsom got Kelly-McKee into the rear compartment of his patrol vehicle and took her to the fire station.
Kelly-McKee was also dealing with another obstacle before the bees arrived. Telemundo Corpus Christi reported that she was only about four months removed from suffering a fractured spine when she had to run from the swarm.
Strength In Numbers
The “killer bee” nickname can give the wrong impression about what makes Africanized honeybees dangerous.
Their individual stings are not more toxic than those of European honeybees. The difference is largely behavioral.
Africanized honeybees defend their colonies more aggressively and can respond to disturbances with far greater numbers. The University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources notes that they can also pursue perceived threats for up to a quarter-mile.
That distinction was of limited practical value to Kelly-McKee once hundreds of them were following her around a storage facility.
She survived the attack.
The cameras also recorded something considerably more useful than ordinary security footage that day: the path of an escape that required a dog going one way, Kelly-McKee going another, a storage facility owner operating a gate from afar, a sheriff’s deputy arriving with a patrol vehicle, and volunteer firefighters waiting down the road.