Bees attack father and daughter at park, stinging them dozens of times

By Joe Vigil

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    LAS VEGAS, Nevada (KVVU) — Flag football practice turned into a horrifying encounter for Brad Scott and his 11-year-old daughter.

“I flung the glasses off of my face because I had bees crawling in between my glasses and my eyes. They were trying to fly in my mouth. I got stung a ton of times on my ear. Eventually, one of the did make it into my ear,” said Scott.

The attack happened Monday night around 6:30. Scott parked at Desert Diamonds Baseball Complex, which is off Mountains Edge Parkway and South Buffalo Drive.

The father and daughter were walking to her flag football practice. He says bees were bothering some people in the parking lot before they were attacked.

“And I told my daughter, ‘Stay calm. The bees won’t hurt you.’ And then that’s when, a second later maybe, you could hear them. And they just swarmed us,” said Scott.

He added, “But all I could think of at the moment was just trying to get as much of the swarm to come after me and not my daughter. And so, I had her go away and I just tried to stay along the path of the sidewalk and bring the bees kind of closer to me. So, I’m kind of flailing around,” he said.

They both ran into their car, which separated them from most of the bees. Scott says about 15 to 20 bees made it inside the car. He was concerned how their bodies might react to being stung so many times, so he immediately drove to a nearby emergency room, with the windows rolled down to allow the other bees to escape. As they were driving away, Scott warned some kids near the scene.

“And I was just yelling at these kids, ‘Don’t go that way. Don’t go that way. Bees, bees, bees,” said Scott.

He says staff pulled dozens of bee stingers from his body at the emergency room.

“There were four or five bees that I had to get out of my daughter’s hair and drag them out. I had a bee actually fly into my left ear that they had to put lidocaine in my ear and kind of kill the bee. And then it was in there a couple hours,” said Scott.

FOX5 returned to the scene with a local beekeeper who said bees may sometimes attack to protect their hive. She looked around for any sign of a hive.

“One of the first places we looked was the different valve boxes, water valve boxes, because they love that. It has that little hole in it. It’s a perfect spot because it’s nice and cool. It’s underground. I do a lot of removals of those,” said beekeeper Tara Iannucci.

FOX5 did some more searching and found a beehive in some dead brush just off the walking path where the attack happened. Iannucci estimated the hive could have held several thousand bees.

FOX5 then contacted Clark County officials who had the hive removed less than a day after contacting them. County officials told FOX5 that if a hive poses a threat to the public, it’s removed. They said most of the bees would have been exterminated during the removal process. Officials weren’t sure whether the bees were so-called “killer bees.”

Anyone attacked by bees is urged to run and get inside a car or building to limit the numbers stinging them. Iannucci says swatting them may only agitate them more, as would blowing on them, because they don’t like carbon monoxide from a human’s breath.

“The doctor told me that I was stung over 100 times/ My daughter was stung 30 times. Thank God that neither of us have an allergy to bees because if we were allergic, we would have never made it out of the parking lot,” said Scott.

People can call the county to report a hive or problem bees at (702) 455-8200.

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