A dedicated dog owner unintentionally set a world record when he suffered more than 2,000 bee stings while trying to save his pet’s life.
Johannes Relleke suffered the most bee stings survived – an astonishing 2,443 of them – after he and his dog were attacked by an angry swarm on 28 January 1962.
In a tragic turn of events, Johannes’s attempts to flee the bees and save his dog resulted in his companion being eaten by a crocodile.
His incredible survival story features in an episode of Guinness World Records podcast Behind the Book.
Editor-in-chief Craig Glenday says: “One of my favourite survivor stories is a guy called Johannes Relleke who was stationed at a tin mine in Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe, in January 1962.
“As the story goes, he and his dog were out walking near the mine, they got set upon by a huge pack of angry bees, like big African killer bees.
“So, Johannes and his dog ran for their lives, they jumped into the Gwaii River. Johannes was more obsessed about protecting his dog so spent a lot of the time trying to keep his dog’s nose above the water – so dog under water, nose above so dog could survive.
He got really badly stung and what he didn’t realize, this is awful, is that a crocodile came and ate the dog while he was trying to rescue it from the bees – it’s awful, isn’t it?
“Anyway, he made it to the bank – the crocodile was well fed – and when the doctors finally picked out all the stings they counted 2,443 stings, isn’t that amazing? But he survived.”
It’s said that the average person can safely tolerate 10 stings for every pound of their body weight.
That means the average child could be killed by 500 stings, whereas an adult could withstand around 1,000 stings.
Amazingly, Johannes survived more than double that.
A person who is allergic to bee stings could be killed by just one, which would cause an anaphylactic reaction where the blood pressure falls and the airway closes.
Bees with smooth stingers are capable of stinging multiple times, however, for some bees this action is fatal.
Honey bees have barbed stingers that can become stuck in the skin of the animal or human they've stung, resulting in the stinger being left behind when the bee tries to fly away and them being effectively disembowelled.
Honey bee stingers will continue to pump venom into the skin even after the bee is gone.
The pain that people feel after being stung is caused by an acidic compound called melittin that’s in their venom.
Johannes was lucky to have survived so many bee stings, but tragically, his dog didn’t make it out of the encounter alive.
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