Doctors in Taiwan were startled at the discovery of four live bees under a woman’s eyelids who was being treated for a swollen eye.

The 29-year-old Taiwanese woman, named He, visited a hospital with an eye infection. Doctors at the Fooyin University Hospital in Taiwan were horrified when they saw the bees and described it as ‘world’s first’ such case. They were able to successfully remove all four sweat bees from the woman’s tear duct.

The hospital’s Head of Ophthalmology, Dr Hung Chi-ting, said that he saw something that looked like insect legs. The doctor pulled them out under a microscope slowly, without damaging their bodies.

The woman was tending to a family member’s grave. While pulling out weed, she felt something falling in her eye. She washed her eye with water but the eye began to swell up and she started feeling pain under her eyelid.

The doctors presumed it to be an infection, but it turned out to be something unexpected. When Dr Hung looked at He’s eye through a microscope, he spotted tiny legs of the bees in her ducts. The bees were feeding off the moisture and salt of her tears.

Dr Hung mentioned that sweat bees commonly nest near graves.