On July 16, 2011, two beekeepers stepped onto scales in Shaoyang, Hunan province, China, to take part in a competition that’s quite hard to imagine: the winner was whoever managed to accumulate the most kilos of live bees on their body.
Wang Dalin, 42, and Lu Kongjiang, 20, showed up wearing only shorts and protective glasses, but how did they attract the swarm? They wore small cages containing queen bees tied to their bodies, so the others would approach. This formed what is known as the “bee beard”, which also covered their legs and torsos.
And they stayed like that for an hour.
When it was time to weigh them, Lu had managed to carry 22,9 kilos of bees. But it wasn’t enough: Wang ended up covered in 26,86 kilos, taking the victory.
However impressive his feat may have seemed, Wang wasn’t even close to the record. Just a month earlier, another Chinese beekeeper, Zhang Wei, had managed to withstand 83,5 kilos of bees on his body: more than triple the amount carried by the winner of that competition.
Thus, the 26,86 kilos that had just made Wang champion were only a fraction of what another man had already dared to “wear”.