It just wasn't this man's day. In addition to being swarmed by bees, he ended up losing his wedding ring. David Ashe was doing some landscaping to prepare for a pool in August.
He was in his North Carolina backyard when his weedeater set off a yellowjacket nest. The bees quickly swarmed around him, stinging him more than 100 times. In all of the commotion, he lost his wedding ring as well.
"I was swatting hard, and my ring shot off, and at that point I just ran," he told NBC affiliate WXII 12. Stung and injured, he was distraught to lose his expensive but priceless possession. "My ring is very, very sentimental and precious to me because my wife picked it out and engraved it."
"It felt naked because in the 12 years I've had this, I wear this every single day," he also added. "And my wife was reassuring me. She's like, 'You know, it doesn't mean we're not married; it just means you don't have your ring.' But for me, it felt like something was missing. Something was just not right."
Battle with Bees
He was certain that he would never find the ring after the bees, even with a metal detector.
"It fills with water and kind of pushes," he said of the ravine. "I thought for sure that's what was happening. It was just going to keep pushing on out into [nearby] Lake Norman."
Fortunately, he turned to a group called Ring Finders and Brad Trogdon for help.
"It was late. It was very hot. I was soaking wet, and I said, 'I'm going to give it one more go because I hadn't searched that area but once,' " Trogdon told WXII 12. "And when I did, the second search is when we came across it."
Trogdon found the ring in the mud.
"And that's when I grinned real big, and I said to [Ashe], I'm like, 'You didn't say it had diamonds in it!' "
