SAN MIGUEL X’KALAX, Mexico – The swarm of bees chased Daniel Couoh Puc around his little thatched-roof house, around his orange and lemon trees and finally, his wife said, into an outhouse. He slammed the door, but the bees massed around the stucco building until they found their way in through narrow window slats and killed him with more than 100 stings.
“They came like a black cloud and, oh, the buzzing sound of them,” said Maria Cecilia Choc, the sad-eyed widow of Couoh, who died Feb. 26 in this small village on the Yucatan Peninsula, 20 miles south of the Gulf of Mexico. Her pregnant daughter-in-law, her 5-year-old grandson and eight others were also stung by the swarm and treated by doctors. Firefighters said that the bees’ hive, found high in a nearby tree, had been disturbed by high winds and that the upset bees also killed 11 hens, 2 turkeys and 1 pig that day.
It’s bee season again in Mexico, when agitated bees in one of the world’s largest honey-producing nations are swarming. These spring months, jittery people around Mexico report so many attacks that some fire departments are spending as much as half of their time answering emergency bee calls.
Bees are a $125 million-a-year business in Mexico, which cultivates 2 million commercial hives, about 40 percent of them in the tropical Yucatan, said government agriculture officials. Many people have a deep respect for the medicinal and economic powers of bees, and it’s hard to find someone with a bad thing to say about them. People shrug off the dozen or so deaths that occur annually as the cost of living in the land of milk and honey.
This flat and humid area bursting with purple and yellow spring flowers is blessed with an abundance of honeybee colonies, and it is the center of a national industry that employs 40,000 people and produces 60,000 tons of honey a year. That output ranks Mexico behind only China, Argentina and the United States, industry officials said.
The Maya Indians, who make up the majority of the population here, for centuries have been harvesting honey, bee pollen and royal jelly – a prized bee product used in cosmetics and medicines. Liqueurs are made from honey extracts, and glass is blown into the shape of crystal bees that are sold as souvenirs. Santiago Tec Mendoza, organizer of a group of 500 honey producers around Tizimin, said bees have wondrous curing powers, aiding everything from respiratory to arthritic problems. Tec said locals even have a saying, “If you bathe a baby in honey, he will grow up to be lucky in love.”
Seventeen Mexicans were reported killed in bee attacks last year, many of them in the spring, when rising temperatures and blooming flowers stir up more bee activity, according to apiarists, people who keep bees. But among the population here, the attacks and deaths are seen as nothing more than an occupational hazard, the way miners or fishermen are accustomed to losing friends to the perils of their business.
Andres Chan Sandoval, 54, who makes his living by patiently extracting honey from hives, stood in front of the building where his neighbor Couoh died and said that despite the tragedy, “I am not afraid of bees, I have worked with them for 30 years.”
Chan said that he had been stung many times over the years and that small amounts of venom from bee stings made his body healthier. “I have never once been sick,” he said.
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