Rockport Woman Stung 300 Times by Killer Bees, Trapped by Locked Storage Gate

Rachel Kelly-McKee was stung more than 300 times by a swarm of Africanized honey bees outside her storage unit at Goose Island Park Storage in Rockport, Texas, an attack made worse by an automatic gate that briefly trapped her inside the facility as she tried to flee. Kelly-McKee, who was still recovering from a broken spine sustained four months earlier, struggled to outrun the bees while her German shepherd, Chelsea, also came under attack.

According to WOAI, the swarm emerged from a tree beside Kelly-McKee's storage unit after she opened the unit's door with Chelsea nearby. Kelly-McKee said she initially noticed just a few bees on her dog and believes Chelsea may have provoked the hive. She told the station she thought the insects were ordinary honeybees, not the far more aggressive Africanized strain that has established itself across the region.

Once the bees swarmed, Kelly-McKee ran around swatting at them and trying to pull them off her body, but her path out of the facility was blocked by an automatic gate designed to open for vehicles, not pedestrians on foot. The gate could only be triggered by a car or opened remotely, and the storage-unit owner, who saw what was happening to her, opened it manually from a distance so she could get out, per the station's report.

A Deputy's Race Against a Fatal Sting Count

Aransas County Sheriff's Deputy Will Newsom responded to the scene in Rockport and told WOAI that Kelly-McKee's sting count was definitely in the fatal range. Newsom said he knew there was limited time to get her to medical care, so rather than wait for an ambulance, he loaded her into the back compartment of his patrol car and drove her directly to the Lamar Volunteer Fire Station.

Medical literature cited by Frontiers in Pharmacology indicates the median lethal dose of honeybee venom for a non-allergic adult is roughly 1,000 stings, though severe toxic organ failure or death can occur with as few as 200 to 500 stings depending on a victim's age and health. That threshold framed Deputy Newsom's urgency: with more than 300 stings already delivered, Kelly-McKee was well within a range doctors consider potentially fatal.

At the Lamar Volunteer Fire Station, first responders used a fire hose to spray Kelly-McKee down, dislodging hundreds of bees still clinging to her body before medical treatment could begin, according to Telemundo Corpus Christi. She received medical attention at the fire station after the ordeal. The Lamar Volunteer Fire Department had arrived at the Rockport scene, and surveillance video captured by a camera at the storage facility documented the attack.

Why Africanized Bees Are So Hard to Escape

Africanized honey bee venom is no more toxic per sting than that of a standard European honey bee, but the hybrid strain attacks in far greater numbers and reacts to disturbances much faster, according to the same report. The USDA Agricultural Research Service notes that Africanized bees defend a perimeter up to five times larger than their European counterparts and can deploy up to ten times more defenders within seconds of being disturbed.

That defensive intensity also means victims cannot simply walk or jog away from an agitated hive. Africanized bees have been documented pursuing perceived threats up to a quarter-mile from their nest, whereas standard honeybees typically abandon a chase after 30 to 50 yards, per research highlighted by Atlas Obscura. The hybrid strain traces back to 1950s cross-breeding experiments in Brazil and first reached the United States in October 1990, when a swarm was detected in a monitoring trap near Hidalgo, Texas.

Aransas County, where Rockport sits, is among more than 100 Texas counties officially designated under quarantine for Africanized honey bees, according to state agricultural officials cited by North Texas e-News. Texas A&M AgriLife Extension safety guidelines urge anyone caught in a bee swarm to run in a straight line toward shelter in a building or vehicle, and specifically warn against jumping into water, since bees will hover above the surface and sting a victim the moment they resurface to breathe.

Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that hornet, wasp, and bee stings cause roughly 60 to 80 deaths across the United States each year, with the vast majority of rapid fatalities linked to allergic anaphylactic shock rather than sheer venom volume. Large-scale bee emergencies are not uncommon in Texas; in June 2026, an overturned semi-trailer in Orange County released an estimated 400 hives and millions of bees, prompting neighborhood shelter-in-place orders and a multi-agency response, according to Texas A&M AgriLife Extension's Insects in the City program.

Matthew Roberts spoke with Kelly-McKee about her ordeal as she recovers from the stings on top of her earlier spinal injury. Deputy Newsom, who works for the Aransas County Sheriff's Office, is credited with getting her to care quickly enough to avoid the worst outcomes described in the medical literature on toxic envenomation.