In one of the world’s few medically documented cases, a Philadelphia man was stung by a bee directly in the eyeball and had to endure some serious consequences.

Most people dread the idea of getting stung by a bee anywhere on their bodies but imagine having one of those buzzers piercing your eyeball with its stinger as you’re casually strolling about. Unfortunately, that was the experience of a very unlucky 55-year-old Philadelphia man who reported to the emergency room with severely deteriorated vision and pain in his right eye after being stung by a bee in the eyeball two days prior. The patient told doctors that he had gone to the hospital immediately after getting stung, and doctors there had extracted the bee stinger and sent him on his way. Only it turned out that they hadn’t done that good of a job and a piece of the stinger remained embedded into the man’s eyeball.

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When a three-year-old girl from Charlotte, North Carolina, started complaining to her parents about monsters in the walls of her room, they thought she was imagining things, but there really was something in the walls.

Little Saylor Class had recently watched DreamWorks’ ‘Monster Inc’ animated movie when she started talking to her parents about monsters in the walls, so they didn’t really take her seriously. In fact, they even gave her “a bottle of water and said it was monster spray so that she could spray away any of the monsters at night,” but her complaints only got stronger over the following months. Saylor’s parents started taking her more seriously when her mother Massis noticed bees swarming near the attic and chimney of their old farmhouse. Massis Class thought the daughter could hear the bees buzzing through the ceiling, but things were even worse than that.

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Isolated on an island in the middle of the southeastern Pacific Ocean, the bees of Easter Island are free of all the pathogens and pesticides ravaging the global bee population, and therefore produce the purest honey on the planet.

The beekeepers of Chile’s Easter Island are fully aware that their bees may one day become the salvation of the world’s most important polinator. With bee colonies all over the world struggling to survive serious threats like pesticide poisoning, new diseases and climate change, the bees of Easter Island are probably the only ones in the world yet to be affected by such problems. And their owners hope to keep it that way. They have managed to convince the local government to ban the importation of bees, because of the significant risk of contamination.

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Bees are considered an omen of good fortune in China, so when a man found a swarm of bees building their nest in his car, he decided to just drive the car with his new winged companions.

A man from China’s Anhui province recently went viral after posting a series of videos of himself calmly driving in his car with bees swarming around inside the vehicle. Most people would freak out at the sight of a single bee flying around their head, but the Chinese driver, surnamed Yao, was all smiles and even boasted that he was ‘going to be rich,’ referring to the belief that bees visiting one’s home was an auspicious omen. It’s unclear how the bees got into the car or why they chose it as their place of congregation, but the viral videos gave many on social media goosebumps.

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To celebrate World Bee Day properly, Italian beekeeper Rocco Filomeno recently listed the world’s first bee farm on Airbnb, allowing guests to sleep to the sound of over 1 million buzzing insects.

Located on Rocco’s olive farm just outside the picturesque village of Grottole in southern Italy, the unique accommodation was designed by artist Davide Tagliabue, financed through crowdfunding and built with the help of local volunteers. The modest structure was made entirely of fir and birchwood and cost only $17,000 to make. It might not look like much at first glance, but what really makes it unique is that it is built around a giant hive of over 1 million bees. The main idea was for visitors to fall asleep to the buzzing of bees, a humming sound known to have a soothing effect.

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While the vast majority of bee species rely on the pollen and nectar of flowers for nutrients, a few so-called “vulture bees” have evolved to feast on carrion, just like vultures or hyenas.

It was only a few decades ago that entomologists made the rather staggering discovery that not all bees feed on pollen and nectar. Deep in the rainforests of Costa Rica they found three bee species that seemed to prefer dead flesh to flowers. In a recently-published study, scientists revealed that these “vulture bees” had gut bacteria that appeared to thrive in acidic environments, just like the bacteria found in the guts of other carrion-loving creatures, like vultures and hyenas. Another surprising discovery was that, despite their unusual diet, the vulture bees still produced sweet honey.

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A near-vertical cliff wall in the mountains of Shennongjia Nature Reserve, China’s Hubei Province, is home to over 700 wooden boxes which make up one of the country’s last sanctuaries for native wild bees.

Beekeeping has been carried out in China since at least the 2nd century AD, and roughly half of the world’s supply of honey comes from the Asian country, but few know that over 80% of the native bee population is now extinct. The introduction of the European honey bee (Apis Mellifera) is considered the main cause of the drastic decline of native Chinese bees. It has brought viral diseases, has been known to attack Chinese honeybee hives, and interfere with its mating rituals. Today, the Chinese honey bee (Apis Cerana Cerana) is listed as an endangered species, and the cliff-hanging hives of the Shennongjia Nature Reserve make up one of the few protected sanctuaries in the country.

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The Euglossines, aka Orchid Bees are often described as the world’s most flamboyant bee tribe, and looking at their brilliant metallic coloration, it’s easy to see why.

Orchid bees are probably the closest thing to real living jewel. Sporting bright metallic colors – with green, blue and gold being the most common – and very few hairs compared to other families of bees, these pollinators really stand out as some of the most visually striking insects on Earth. But it’s not just their bright, shiny exterior that sets them apart from other bees. Euglossines don’t make honey, they don’t build hives, most species of the tribe are solitary, and perhaps most fascinating of all, males collect and mix fragrances which they then use to impress females.

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İbrahim Sedef, an experienced beekeeper from Turkey’s Black Sea Region, has come up with an ingenious way of having his honey tested by the same bears that used to steal it.

Agricultural engineer and beekeeper İbrahim Sedef had been struggling to deal with thieving bears for over four months, but nothing worked. When he tried covering his precious beehives with steel cages, the bears toppled to get to the precious honey, when he reinforced the cages with a cement base, they just dug in the ground and toppled them again. Even raising the hives higher up didn’t help as the bears just climbed up to reach them. So earlier this month, Sedef decided to stop looking for solutions and at least use the bears’ appetite for honey to his advantage.

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A family in Granada, Spain was shocked to discover that the constant buzzing coming from behind their bedroom wall turned out to be a massive bee colony numbering over 80,000 honey bees.

Spanish social media has been buzzing with the news of a couple in Pinos Puente, Granada, who recently asked a local beekeeper to investigate the increasingly loud buzz sound coming from behind their bedroom wall. They had been hearing it for a while and had long come to the conclusion that it must be caused by bees, but it wasn’t until the buzzing got so loud that they couldn’t sleep at night that they decided to get professional help. Beekeeper Sergio Guerrero had helped remove bee colonies from their properties before, but what he found behind the wall of this particular house left him speechless – a hive of over 80,000 bees and honey combs over a meter long.

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The giant honeybees of East Asia can build impressive open nests measuring a few meters across. The fact that they are always exposed makes them vulnerable to predators, particularly large wasps and hornets that love nothing more than invading hives and stealing grubs. Luckily, the bees have a secret weapon that is as visually mesmerizing as it is effective.

Called shimmering, the unique defensive strategy of giant honeybees involves large numbers of workers raising their rear-ends by ninety degrees and shaking them in unison, creating an effect similar to the well-known Mexican waves seen at stadiums across the world. How hundreds of bees are capable of communicating and producing this highly coordinated response to threats remains unknown, but after 15 years of studying the behavior in the wild, scientists are now convinced that shimmering is a defense mechanism.

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For over a year a couple angered their neighbors by keeping around 10,000 bees in the balcony of their high-rise apartment in the Chinese city of Ningbo.

Police were recently called to a residential building in the coastal city of Ningbo after a couple living there ignored numerous complaints from their neighbors about the thousands of pet bees they kept on their balcony. About a year ago, the unnamed couple installed a small beehive in their high-rise apartment with the intention of using them for “bee sting treatment”, a form of alternative medicine believed to help alleviate the symptoms of painful conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. However, the insects kept breeding and their number swelled to around 10,000, becoming a nuisance to the other residents.

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Wallace Leatherwood , a beekeeper from North Carolina, went through what most people would consider a living nightmare and came out unscathed. He drove 40 miles with thousands of bees loose in the cabin of his truck, and didn’t get a single sting.

Last Tuesday, Leatherwood bought about 18,000 bees from Wild Mountain Bees in Weaverville, and put them in the back of his truck. But before driving back home to Waynesville, he went to look at a job and then stopped at a local diner to get some lunch. Because he didn’t have anywhere shady to put the bees, he grabbed three of the boxes from the bed of his truck and moved them into the cabin. Only Wallace didn’t notice that one of them wasn’t as securely closed as he had thought, so when he came back from the restaurant, he found the cabin crawling with around 3,000 bees.

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British beekeeper and musician Bioni (pronounced BEE-own-ee) Samp has found an incredible way to combine his two greatest passions. He records the frequencies of his bees and uses them to create original electronic musical compositions.

Bioni – a pseudonym, as his real name is a closely guarded secret – produces abstract music that is rhythmic and dancey, but the 50-something Londoner has a higher goal than making people get jiggy with it on the dance floor. He uses his unusual music to raise awareness about colony collapse disorder (CDC), a plague that has wiped out millions of honeybee hives globally since 2006. Billions of bees are killed by CDC every year, and that’s not counting the ones that dies as result of climate change and pesticide poisoning. he feels that by using bees as a musical instrument he can get through to people easier than by preaching to them about the plight of bees and the dangers their extinction poses to humanity.

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The sight of a single bee buzzing around is enough to drive some people into a frenzy, but one family in China has somehow been living with an entire beehive in their living room for 12 years. They even collect the honey from it and sell it for a small profit.

Remember the BEEcosystem, that observational beehive that lets you keep bees inside your home as pets? Well, it turns out you don’t need it. You can just let bees build their own beehive on your furniture and let them fly around freely. It sounds crazy, but one family in China is proof that it can be done, and not just for a few days or weeks, but over a decade.

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