Last Friday, Larry Goodwin was celebrating his 62nd birthday. Today, his family is making funeral arrangements.

Goodwin, a resident of Moody, Texas, was consolidating a brush pile on a neighbor's property when he accidentally jostled an old chicken coop into a hive of Africanized bees. The swarm quickly attacked Goodwin, stinging him repeatedly and fatally leaving his skin swollen and disfigured.

"When we got to him he was purple," said Goodwin's daughter, Tanya. "He had numerous - thousands and thousands - of bee stings on his face and arms."

Two neighbors, a mother and daughter (who have not been named), rushed to help Goodwin when they saw him in distress. While Goodwin himself was not allergic, the mother trying to resuscitate him was. She and her daughter suffered over 100 bee stings between them in their 45-minute struggle to help Goodwin. The coop contained 22 hives and approximately 40,000 bees.

John Puckett, the father and husband of the responders, choked back tears thinking of the encounter. "I came pretty close to losing my family," he said.

Despite the neighbors' efforts, Goodwin was pronounced dead on the scene. A bee removal service removed the bees the following day.

Allen Miller, owner of Bees Be Gone, says he's seen five cases of Africanized bees in the last month - more than he normally sees all year.

Africanized bees are hybrids of European bees and African honey bees. These hybrids display far more aggression than any of their subspecies, as they have been known to hijack a European hive in small swarms and kill its queen.

Goodwin's family now wants to warn people of the threat these bees present.

"If anybody has any brush or anything on their lands, please clear it, because they don't want to go through this," Tanya Goodwin said, wiping away tears. "Nobody needs to go through this."