]
Several dozen people were injured – with three rushed to hospital in a critical condition – in an unusual bee attack in a French town, local authorities said.
Twenty-four passersby were hurt when hundreds of bees suddenly attacked people in the central-southern town of Aurillac on Sunday morning. The three in a critical condition are now stable.
According to local media, one of them was a 78-year-old woman who was stung 25 times and had to be resuscitated after a cardiorespiratory arrest.
Police and firefighters fenced off the area and a beekeeper was called in to smoke out the bees – a safe way to calm the insects.
A local woman called Andrée said she witnessed “very panicked people” trying to bat off the bees. “I could tell they were being attacked by something but I couldn’t figure out what,” she told French media.
The mayor of Aurillac, Pierre Mathonier, was reported as saying that Asian hornets threatening a beehive may have been the catalyst for the attack.
But Christian Carrier, the president of the regional beekeepers’ union, was sceptical.
He told France Info that bees generally avoid leaving their colonies altogether in the presence of Asian hornets.
Instead, he said that the unusual incident may have been due to the bee colony becoming too large for its beehive and becoming “overactive” when the beekeeper handled it.
“It may be that [the bees] didn’t have enough space and that their colony had no intention of swarming. This can trigger strong aggression,” Mr Carrier said.
The mayor’s chief of staff, Vincent Fournier, acknowledged the presence of Asian hornets could be one of the reasons for the bees’ odd behaviour.
However, he also said the bees could have been stressed because of a problem with the queen bee, or could have been reacting to external factors such as “heatwaves, early blossoming in May-June and subsequent lack of food in July, or a sharp drop in temperatures”.
“The causes of this incident will be analysed,” he told the BBC, adding the beehives have now been moved to a location outside the town of Aurillac.
