RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

A hive of bees on an elec­tric­i­ty pole, which caused chaos in Ma­yaro on Wednes­day, at­tack­ing passers-by and forc­ing the evac­u­a­tion of the mar­ket, has been re­moved.

One per­son re­mained hos­pi­talised yes­ter­day af­ter be­ing at­tacked by the bees.

Teams from the T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion and the Api­aries Unit re­moved the hive from the pole late Wednes­day evening.

MP for Ma­yaro Rush­ton Paray said they were al­so plan­ning to re­move an­oth­er hive from a lean­ing pole.

Just be­fore noon on Wednes­day, the bees de­scend­ed on the town, chas­ing af­ter pedes­tri­ans as they walked past the Ma­yaro mar­ket and caus­ing peo­ple to scam­per in all di­rec­tions.

Videos of the in­ci­dent show an el­der­ly man falling to the ground and no­body go­ing to his res­cue.

Cov­er­ing his ears and fore­head, he even­tu­al­ly got up and stum­bled down the street while the in­sects con­tin­ued their at­tack. Oth­ers tried in vain to run away from the bees.

Res­i­dent David Tang, who was stung all over his body, said there were sev­er­al poles where the bees had been build­ing hives.

He said res­i­dents had been re­port­ing the bees to sev­er­al gov­ern­ment agen­cies but noth­ing had been done.

Re­call­ing the in­ci­dent­Tang said, “I was in Ma­yaro this morn­ing, killer bees at­tacked me. My face, hands and oth­er old peo­ple fell to the ground but I could not help them, else I would have got­ten more sting.”

Show­ing off his swollen hands and face, Tang called on the au­thor­i­ties to move swift­ly to kill the in­sects.

Mean­while, at the mar­ket, there was al­so chaos. Ven­dors hur­ried­ly packed up their goods and evac­u­at­ed. Those who were re­luc­tant to leave their goods and sales lit a fire on the ground to ward off the in­sects.

Ven­dor Keyes Rame­sar ac­cused the au­thor­i­ties of tak­ing too long to help.

“No­body as­sist­ing no how. The bees come in­to the mar­ket and start to at­tack. We had to light a fire in the mar­ket to keep them out. Right now we can­not make a dol­lar. The whole stall is full of bees,” she said.

Paray said the Apari­aries Unit iden­ti­fied the hive on top a T&TEC pole in the town cen­tre.

“At that time there was heavy traf­fic, so the of­fi­cers de­cid­ed not to erad­i­cate the mas­sive hive un­til the traf­fic cleared.”

Ma­yaro po­lice redi­rect­ed traf­fic while T&TEC of­fi­cials dis­con­nect­ed the pow­er lines to fa­cil­i­tate the erad­i­ca­tion.