Bees are dying at an alarming rate, you know, and Mohamed Hagras is trying to solve that.
The 31 year-old Hagras of Egypt, once an engineer but now a beekeeper, fondly recalls a Canadian model’s “bikini of bees” that he once saw, which promoted the usefullness of bees to the Egyptian populace at large. So he’s decided to top that by going for a beard of bees. Why?
“The goal is to show that bees are not aggressive,” he told Reuters at his farm.
“One the contrary, they are helpful and produce things that help humans and agriculture.”
When queen bees die, Hagras extracts hormones from them to attract new bees from the same hive to perform his show, and also form new hives. Presumably, he does this to also terrify onlookers.
Hagras uses his “beard of bees” at exhibitions, shows where people try to break obscenely crazy world records. The current record of “bees on a human body” (which is a real record, apparently) is over a million of them which a Chinese beekeeper allowed over his entire body last year. The combined weight of the bees was over 242 pounds.
Many people come to Hagras’ farm to get stung in order to potentially cure various diseases, he says.
You thought bees were dying at an alarming rate, huh? Well they still are, but Hagras is still trying to buck that unfortunate trend. He’s certainly not one to shout “Not the bees!”
[Reuters]
