Man sports a bee beard!

Mohamed Hagras stands bare-chested as dozens of honeybees congregate around his face, eventually forming what he calls the ‘Beard of bees.’ To attract the insects, he has a box housing their queen’s hormones strapped to his chin.

The 31-year-old engineer-turned-beekeeper has been doing this for years. “The goal is to show that bees are not aggressive,” he told Reuters at his farm in Shibin El Kom, the capital of the Nile Delta province of Menoufia.

“On the contrary, they are helpful and produce things that help humans and agriculture.”

Hagras extracts hormones from queen bees after they die and uses them to attract bees from the same hive to perform his show and also to form new hives, he says. He uses the “Beard of bees” at contests and exhibitions where like-minded people try to break world records. The current holder is a Chinese beekeeper who in 2015 covered his entire body with over a million bees, a combined weight of almost 110 kg (242.5 lb).

Other than honey and pollen, bees also have medicinal benefits, Hagras says, adding that many people come to his farm to get stung in efforts to cure various diseases.

Toy-filled plastic eggs cover beach

Children in a German town were delighted after a powerful storm left one beach covered in thousands of plastic eggs.

The plastic eggs filled with small toys were scattered across the beach in the German town of Langeoog after Storm Axel knocked several containers off a freighter of the Danish firm Reederei Maersk, according to Deutsche Welle.

Storm Axel was responsible for some of the worst flooding in Germany since 2006, but Langeoog Mayor Uwe Garrels found a way to turn the massive mess caused by the storm into a positive for local kindergarteners by allowing them to keep the eggs for themselves, the BBC reported.

“The surprise eggs have found their way to freedom,” he said. Garrels added that any foreign companies or institutions who perceived the gesture as theft were welcome to collect the plastic eggs as well as the “untold amounts of plastic bags and other packaging materials” found on the shore.

105-year-old cyclist bikes 14 miles in an hour

A French cyclist continued to chase records at the age of 105 by biking 14 miles around a track in an hour. Robert Marchand completed 92 laps within an hour in front of hundreds of fans at the velodrome at Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in France.

Marchand has set multiple cycling records in the over-100s category, including travelling 16 miles in an hour at the age of 102, and a new over-105s category to accommodate his new achievement.

Marchand became a vegetarian a month before the record breaking attempt and doctors encouraged him to take up meat again before attempting the record.

“He is very small but his heart is very big,” Professor Veronique Billat told CNN. “His V02 max oxygen consumption is the same as a man of half his age who doesn’t do any sports.”

“I’m not here to break any record. I’m doing it to prove that at 105 years, you can still ride a bike,” he said before the record attempt.

Published in Dawn, Young World, January 14th, 2017