HONG KONG — First came their fuzzy feet.

From the left eye of his patient, a doctor would eventually remove four tiny bees.

“Under the microscope, I slowly pulled them out, one after another,” Dr. Hung Chi-ting, an ophthalmologist at Fooyin University Hospital in Taiwan, said at a news conference broadcast by local media last week.

The patient, identified by her last name, He, said that her ordeal began when she felt a sharp pain in her left eye while taking part in an annual tradition of tomb-sweeping. Plucking weeds from a gravestone, she rinsed what she thought was sand from her eyes with some clean water. By the time she returned home hours later, her eye was heavily swollen. Tears and other secretions streamed out.

She sought medical help. And under her left eyelid, Dr. Hung found what are colloquially known as sweat bees.