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Doctors in Taiwan have extracted four bees living under a woman’s eyelids in what is said to be a “world first”.

A Taiwanese woman presented to hospital complaining of a swollen eye, only to discover live bees were under her eyelids.

Doctors managed to extract the bees, which had been feasting on the 29-year-olds tears, the Guardian reported.

The bees are known as sweat bees and had been living in her tear ducts.

Speaking at a press conference, the hospital’s head of ophthalmology Dr Hung Chi-ting said: “I saw something that looked like insect legs, so I pulled them out under a microscope slowly, and one at a time without damaging their bodies.”

According to CTS News, she had been tending to a family member’s grave and was pulling out weeds when she felt something go into her eye.

She presumed it was soil and washed it out with water but her eye later began to swell up and she felt a sharp stinging pain under her eyelid.

Her doctors suspected she had an infection but when they looked at her eye through the microscope they discovered tiny legs of the bees in her tear ducts, where they were feeding off the moisture and salt.

Her eyesight was saved because she had not rubbed her eyes.

The small bees, known as Halictidae or “sweat bees”, are attracted to human perspiration and are found all over the world.