A 70-year-old man lost his life on Monday after being attacked by a swarm of aggressive bees.
Thomas Hicks was mowing the lawn outside his home in Breckenridge, 130 miles west of Dallas, when the bees started to sting.
“I said 'honey, please don’t go back in the back area because those bees are back there.' And he said 'I won’t I promise,'" Hicks' wife Zoni told KTAB.
Zoni left for the grocery store when Hicks started mowing, but she returned home to find her husband screaming and covered in bees.
“He was covered in like, I mean you couldn’t even see his back and his whole head he was just covered in killer bees," she said.
She called 911. Hicks went into cardiac arrest and passed by the time emergency responders arrived.
Zoni was taken to the hospital to be treated for multiple bee stings.
Emergency personnel went door to door to ask neighbors to be quiet until "until the bees could hive back up and calm down," according to a Facebook post by the Breckenridge Fire Department.
With the help of a local bee keeper, firefighters were able to destroy the hive that was in hollowed out tree and remove it.
Photo: Breckenridge Fire Department