Seventeen plantation workers were admitted to the Dickoya Base Hospital on Monday after being attacked by wasps while plucking tea in Hatton, Ada Derana reported.
Sixteen of the injured are women and one is a man.
The attack happened at the seventh tea field in the upper section of Raja Estate, within the Hatton police division. A wasp nest in a tree was disturbed, and the swarm attacked a group of workers who were working nearby.
The second such attack in five days
This is the second mass wasp or hornet attack on plantation workers in the hill country inside a week. Ten workers were hospitalised at Maskeliya on 27 August after a nest was disturbed during a puja at a tea estate kovil, in the same Nuwara Eliya district tea country.
In June, twenty students were hospitalised after a swarm attacked their school at Aralaganwila in Dimbulagala.
The mechanism is the same each time. Nests are built high in the shade trees that stand over tea fields and estate buildings, and a disturbance at the base of such a tree — vibration, a struck branch, smoke or noise — provokes an attack on everyone in the vicinity rather than on the individual who disturbed it. Where people are working or gathered in groups, a single nest produces a mass casualty event.
What has not been reported
Ada Derana did not report the condition of those admitted, what disturbed the nest, or whether the nest has since been removed. It did not say whether plucking on the field has been suspended, or name the estate management company.
No other verified Sri Lankan newsroom had reported the incident at the time of writing.
