Killer bees kill five after bus crashes into their hives in Nicaragua
Killer bees stung five people to death in Nicaragua after their bus careened into a ravine and struck the beehives.
A bus carrying 45 people in San Sebastian de Yali in Nicaragua’s department of Jinotega crashed Monday, falling 165 feet into a ravine and striking several wooden beehives used by a local coffee plantation.
While driver and survivor Santos Herrera, 22, is still being investigated, the initial theory is that mechanical faults with the bus caused the crash.
Of the passengers, 17 were injured, with eight being hospitalized. Among that latter group, five passengers would die of bee stings, while a sixth would die of head trauma from the accident itself.
The deceased are Eneyda Torrez, 47; her daughter Andrea Garcia, 8; Reyna Olivas, 84; Santos Calderon, 24; Dilcia Flores, 32; and Kenya Soza, 19.
Torrez, Garcia, Calderon and Flores would be pronounced dead soon after arriving at a health center in San Sebastian de Yali, while Soza and Olivas would die later Monday afternoon.
Injured passengers taken to Victoria Mota Hospital in the city of Jinotega include Justin Rivas, 4, Wendy Figueroa, 24, Yelba Molinares, 27, and a pregnant woman of unspecified age, Alma Rivera, according to local news source La Nueva Radio Ya.
Video posted to Twitter by La Nueva Radio Ya showed local residents helping load some of the passengers into the flatbed of a truck, to take them to the hospital in Jinotega.
Tragedia en Yalí: Cuatro muertos por picaduras de abejas al caer autobús en barranco, autoridades de salud trasldaron de urgencia a todos los afectados al Hospital de Jinotega pic.twitter.com/L8JCij7uO6
— La Nueva Radio YA (@nuevaya) May 8, 2023
The hives contained Africanized killer bees, a more aggressive subspecies of the insect, that have been known to swarm and kill human interlopers.
The variant was introduced to Brazil in 1956, but bees subsequently escaped, and have made their way as far north as the United States.
