GV man recovering from 1,000 bee stings

The Green Valley victim of nearly 1,000 bee stings is “taking it easy” for a few days after being released from a hospital Friday.

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John Pool, 84, was remarkably cheerful on Saturday at his home in the 200 block of S. Paseo Seco near Esperanza Boulevard.

“I feel pretty good now,” Pool, a veteran of World War II, said. “I wouldn’t want to go through this again though.”

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On Thursday morning, Pool, who uses a walker and is legally blind, took his 14-year-old dog Shadow for a walk just before 8 a.m.

“I was going along for a little ways and this bee kept buzzing over my head and I kept waving it away,” Pool recalled. “Suddenly, four or five bees joined the first one and things started going wrong. I left my walker and started running for it when I realized more and more were coming at me.”

Pool said he realized his dog was being attacked, too, when she began to yelp.

Pool’s wife Norma said she saw her husband appear in their yard and knew “something was very wrong” when she saw him rushing in without his walker.

“I heard yelling at first and I couldn’t figure out what was going on,” Norma said. “When I rushed out to open the gate for him, I saw that he was just covered in bees and falling down. I struggled to get him up and I started hosing him down with the garden hose to get the bees off.”

Shadow, their seven-pound toy poodle did not make it.

“The vet stopped counting after about 200 stingers,” Norma said. “Shadow couldn’t take it any more and was getting weaker.”

John, on the other hand, appeared tired, but showed very little signs of having been stung so many times.

He said he was stung everywhere, though, including his eyelids, mouth, inside the ears and even through his T-shirt.

“They kept coming and it definitely hurt a lot, but I’m OK,” he said. “I can’t say the same for Shadow.”

Green Valley Fire District and Southwest Ambulance arrived after Norma called 9-1-1.

“The firefighters used credit cards to scrape a lot of the stingers from my arms and legs,” John said.

One firefighter described Pool as looking “as though he was covered in dirt because the stingers were so dense on his body.”

The bee hive was found in a 7-foot block column in the backyard of a home with heavy vegetation. Firefighters with oxygen tanks and protective gear knocked down part of the wall and sprayed foam onto the hive as bees swarmed.

Neighbors were warned to stay inside, and a beekeeper later came in to remove the hive.

GVFD Firefighter Greg Van Alstine said a top piece of the wall was missing and the bees built their hive deep inside.

“After we knocked it down, that’s when we noticed that the piece was missing, and they were coming out of it, attacking us like crazy,” he said. “There were just too many of them.”

The Pools said they will have a quiet few days at home with their other two dogs, Sassafras, 3, and Mr. Chips, 12.

“They know something is wrong since Shadow is not here, but we’ll be OK,” Norma said. “We just don’t want anyone else to ever have to go through this.”

rford@gvnews.com | 547-9740