Enlarge / Bees fly to their hive. (credit: Getty | Federico Gambarini) In what may be the biological equivalent to getting struck by lightning, a very unlucky man in the Philadelphia area took a very rare bee sting directly to the eyeball—and things went badly from there. As one might expect, the 55-year-old went to the emergency department, where doctors tried to extract the injurious insect's stinger from the man's right eye.