Bee-Beard Just to Know You’re Alive

Standing on their respective scales, wearing only shorts and goggles, the two men looked like they were weighing in for an amateur swimming competition. In a matter of moments, they would indeed be swimming — not in water, but in hundreds of thousands of swarming bees.

In July 2011, when Wang Dalin and Lu Kongjiang, two beekeepers from the Hunan province of China, faced off to see who could attract the most bees to their flesh, Dalin won. After one hour, he was cloaked in 57 pounds of the buzzing creatures. With one pound equaling roughly 4,000 bees, that’s a total of 228,000 bees. […] Dalin’s feat was the latest in the strange worldwide pursuit known as bee bearding. Though, in looking at the photos of Dalin head-to-toe in bees, it wasn’t so much a bee beard he was sporting as a bee-otard.

I did not know that this was a practice, but I’ve been looking at some photos, and oh boy! [Mental Floss]