NORMAN, Okla. (KFOR) — An 81-year-old man was saved by a good Samaritan after a bee attack left him with a broken hip.

Carl Amos of Maysville was mowing his yard on Friday when bees started to swarm him. He described them as aggressive and relentless.

“I hit some of them with my hands and you just can’t kill ’em fast enough,” Amos said. “They were going in my hair and going in my ears and in my nose, and I thought I better keep my mouth shut because those bees will be in my mouth.”

He said he did everything he could to get rid of them.

 “I crunched ‘em, and then they didn’t come out,” he said. “So I blew, and then some of them came out, and then I stuck my finger in my nose and pulled them out.”

At one point he started to run, but he fell and hurt his leg.

“I fell to the ground, and I knew I had broken my leg because I heard it pop,” Amos said. “So I thought this is not good.” Amos later learned that he had actually broken his hip.

While he was on the ground, the bees kept stinging. He said it lasted three hours.

“I said, ‘Dear Lord, I’m going to try to make it, but I don’t think I can without you.’” Amos said.

But then a man came by from a business located near his home and called for an ambulance. Amos was taken to a local hospital where doctors and nurses worked to take out stingers.

Carl Amos. Image KFOR.
Carl Amos. (Photo: KFOR)

“I would say over 100,” Dr. Savannah Phillips said, referring to the number of stingers. ” He had so many on his face and his hands.”

It took a team to get rid of the stingers, Phillips said.

“A lot of the nurses and techs kind of formed together to try to get as many as they could out before we transferred him out to the other campus to where he would have his hip surgery,” Phillips said.

Amos was taken to another hospital for his surgery. He is now resting and rehabbing.

His family said it appears to have been “killer” bees, or Africanized bees, that attacked him.

There is a GoFundMe set up to support Amos through his surgery, his rehabilitation and to pay for the bees to be removed.

His daughter, Heather Garvey, said in the fundraising statement that “the bee hive will have to be removed before he can even go home.”

“After all this, he is in good spirits, but it will be a long road to recovery,” she said.

Amos said if it wasn’t for the good Samaritan, he might not be alive.

“I feel like I owe him my life,” he said.