Thousands of bees were removed from this rusted-out old water heater on Lamar LaCaze’s property near Kyle. The barber was hospitalized for six days after being attacked by a swarm of the stinging insects on Aug. 31. PHOTO by KAY RICHTER.
by KAY RICHTER
Kyle area resident Lamar LaCaze credits his cell phone and speed dial with saving his life from the estimated 1,500 bees that attacked him on Aug. 31.
“I could barely see my cell phone,” LaCaze said. “But I knew my life depended on me getting that call through.”
LaCaze, 65, was returning home from his morning at his San Marcos barbershop when he decided to mow some pastureland adjacent to his property located on O’Bryant Road on the outskirts of eastern Kyle.
He was on his tractor and went less than half a round around his property when the bees suddenly attacked.
“They were all over my face,” LaCaze said. He managed to step off his tractor with the intent of getting to a water trough that was located about 75 yards away. He didn’t get there fast enough.
He remembers falling a short distance from the tractor.
“I fell and then I started crawling over towards the fence,” LaCaze said.
LaCaze then placed his first few calls to his wife and his son. His son, Trey had been released from his job a few hours early. After being unable to locate his father at their home, he grew increasingly concerned and placed calls to his father’s cell phone.
“He sounded weak when I spoke to him on the phone,” Trey LaCaze said.
After his initial attempt to locate his father on the property failed, he placed another call to his father’s cell phone. It was only a few minutes before he came upon a surreal scene.
“Growing up in a rural area, we never thought about bees being a threat,” Trey LaCaze said.
Trey and his neighbor, Rudy Cisneros of Kyle rushed to the aid of LaCaze after dialing emergency services. Cisneros remembers the event as something he’d never before witnessed – LaCaze’s face covered nearly entirely with bees, like something on TV.
“I was not expecting it to be that bad,” Cisneros said, “but after I saw it I thought he might not make it.”
LaCaze’s wife, Lois, also did not expect the severity of her husband’s injuries.
“I was shocked, he was attacked by a lot more bees than I could imagine,” Lois LaCaze said.
After a six-day hospital stay at Seton Medical Center Hays, LaCaze’s eyelids were practically swollen shut and his arms were badly bruised and swollen.
His knees are also scraped up from his near death crawl across his pasture. At the hospital, it took nearly two hours for nurses to pull the stingers out of his inflicted areas by using several pairs of tweezers. They counted more than 1,500 stings.
The bees that swarmed LaCaze were honeybees but not necessarily of the feared Africanized “killer bee” variety. Although their venom is no more deadly than other kinds of bees, Africanized bees are noted for attacking perceived threats with a zealousness not normally associated with their European kin.
Africanized bees – actually the same species as the more docile European honey bee – began their spread in the Western Hemisphere when beekeepers unwittingly introduced them to Brazil in 1957. By 1990, the Africanized bee had reached Texas and state lawmakers implemented a quarantine that prohibited Africanized bees from being introduced to areas where they did not already exist. The quarantine was lifted in 2006 at which point Africanized bees were known to live in more than 60 percent of Texas’ 254 counties.
Currently, with Africanized bees increasingly integrated into domestic bee populations, researchers don’t even suggest that landowners test bees to find out if they’re Africanized, said Chris Sansone, an entomology professor at Texas A&M University’s Texas AgriLife Resarch & Extension Center at San Angelo. The distinction is increasingly unimportant, he said.
“The reason why they don’t is that in 95 percent of the cases the bees do have some Africanized genes,” Sansone said.
