[Anchor]
Animals and plants are also suffering amid this blistering heat. Beekeeping farms are worried about the mass mortality of bees, while flower farms are concerned that their flower plants might wither and die.
Reporter Kwon Min-gyu went to the scene.
[Reporter]
At a beekeeping farm in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province, where a heatwave warning was issued at noon today (July 30).
Thousands of honeybees are clinging to the entrance of each of the more than 80 beehives.
As the scorching heat turned the inside into a steamer, they fled outside the hive.
The farmers put up shading screens to block the sunlight and spray water every hour, but it is far from enough to cool down the heat.
The honeycomb I am holding right now normally has about 5,000 bees attached to it.
However, there are only about 1,500 bees on both sides now.
Because the weather is so hot, the bees have escaped toward the entrance or scattered in all directions.
[Jung Byung-woo / Beekeeper: First, hornets come. Second, toads come. They come at night and eat (the bees).]
In addition, due to the heatwave, queen bees do not lay eggs and hatch properly, raising anxieties that it could lead to mass mortality.
[Kim Seon-hee / Former Gyeonggi Branch President, Korean Beekeeping Association: People are dying from the heat right now. How can mute insects survive? I feel like the temperature goes up by about 2 degrees Celsius every year.]
Flower complexes share the exact same worries.
Succulents and cacti are struggling in the heat, and the only facility to cool them down is an ventilation fan for air circulation.
This is the inside of a farm measuring over 3,967 square meters.
The current indoor temperature is 36.5°C (98°F), the exact same as human body temperature.
Even cacti, which grow in hot weather, have ended up dying like this.
[Gu Hwa-soon / Flower Farmer: Since cacti are 90 percent water, they get mushy if it's humid. A lot of them die in the summer. There is nothing we can do.]
In an already scorching summer, the hearts of the farmers are burning up.
(Video by Yang Ji-hoon | Video Editing by Choi Hye-ran)
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