The story of how a man survived an attack by a swarm of angry killer bees is something fit for an episode of the reality drama I Shouldn’t be Alive.

This was what Shane Jacobson from Makhado (Louis Trichardt) thought while he was hiding from the swarm in a swimming pool, his back injured, while struggling to breathe and with his strength rapidly waning.  Only moments before, Shane had been relaxing metres above the ground in a tree, looking down on the world.

Shane and his wife, Petro, are the owners of Tree Top Surgeon, an arborist company in Makhado (Louis Trichardt). Shane cuts down problematic trees for a living and was on duty at a house in Krogh Street last Thursday (30 January) when he was attacked by the bees.

“It was a perfect day, and the sun was just breaking through the clouds,” said Shane. He was hanging from the tree in his safety harness, taking a smoke break and looking down on the children playing at the Borrels Nursery School, next to the client’s house.  At that stage, he had already sawn off about five branches of the tree.

The next moment, without warning, the bees unleashed their raging fury on Shane. “Two bees stung me on the ear, and then they [the bees] were everywhere.”

The attack was unlike anything Shane had ever come across in his years as an arborist. “Usually, a swarm will send out a little scout that buzzes around your head for a while, in which case we will leave the tree alone for a bit and come back later.” Not on Wednesday. In a matter of seconds, the bees were everywhere. “The suckers even got into my mouth,” said Shane.

With the bees covering his face, back and neck with stings, Shane’s eyes and face quickly started to swell. Without being able to see what he was doing, Shane tried frantically to release his safety ropes. The safety clip jammed, however, and Shane plummeted about three storeys down to mother earth.

“According to the owner of the nursery school, the little kids next door learned some new words as Shane was coming down that tree,” Petro cuts in.

On impact with the ground, Shane felt a jolt of pain going through his back. Even so, he managed to struggle through the ropes entangling his feet and get himself to the swimming pool, about six metres away. His chainsaw went with him into the pool.

At the deep end of the pool, Shane realized that he needed to remain under water. “But I could only hold my breath for about four seconds,” he said. With every dragging minute, Shane’s strength also diminished. “I just kept thinking 'I cannot die like this, keep breathing, focus on breathing … breathe'.”

Fortunately, Shane’s employees braved the bees’ onslaught and came to his rescue. One fetched a can of insecticide from the bakkie and handed it to Shane, who emptied it on himself.  The other employee went running down the street, screaming for help.

Pierre Jonker, hearing the man’s frantic cries, rushed to help Shane, who had managed to wade over to the shallow end of the pool in the meantime. Despite constant attacks by the bees, they scooped Shane out of the pool and rushed him to the Louis Trichardt Memorial Hospital.

At that stage, Shane was covered from head to toe in bee stings, and still the bees kept on stinging him. “All I felt was this insane burning all over my body. They could have stung me a hundred times more and I wouldn’t have felt it,” said Shane.

At the memorial hospital, Shane was stabilized and transferred to the Zoutpansberg Private Hospital where he received anti-venom, oxygen treatment and some strong pain medication.  Here, Petro and Shane’s grandmother removed dead bees and stings from him until they covered the whole of his hospital bed. “The bees got him everywhere – some stung him inside his mouth, in his ears and even on the insides of his eyes,” Petro told the newspaper. “There must have been hundreds of thousands of bees.” She kept watch at Shaun’s hospital bed, lovingly taking care of him.

While Shane was recuperating in hospital, the Makhado (Louis Trichardt) community once again proved that when someone is in distress, they are ready to jump in and lend a helping hand. “We were overwhelmed by the community’s reaction,” said Shane and Petro. “There are so many people who supported us. They are too many to thank by name, but to everyone who helped, called or SMSed, thank you,” said Shane and Petro.

Lots of friends and family and even strangers helped the Jacobson family to cover their medical expenses. Fortunately, Shane’s lower-back vertebra had sustained only a fracture during the fall, and his doctors say that it should heal on its own. 

Shane just needs to keep out of trees for a while.