When 3-year-old Saylor Class complained about monsters in her bedroom, her parents dismissed it as a figment of a child’s vivid imagination. However, BBC reported that their perspective soon shifted when a beekeeper found tens of thousands of honeybees above the girl’s bedroom. Saylor had been expressing concerns about “monsters in the wall” of her room at their farmhouse in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Her mother, Ashley Massis Class, and her husband initially didn’t pay much attention to it, considering they recently watched the Pixar movie, Monsters, Inc.
“We even gave her a bottle of water and said it was monster spray so that she could spray away any of the monsters at night,” Massis Class, a home designer told the BBC.
But the trick didn’t work, in the following months, Saylor grew adamant about something being inside her closet. Soon, her mother started connecting the dots and she observed bees gathering in groups in her attic and chimney outside their century-old residence. She figured Saylor must hear the buzzing noise near her bedroom ceiling.
Mrs Class reached out to the pest control company, which discovered the insects were honeybees, a species protected in the US. They later got in touch with a beekeeper who observed the insects moving towards the floorboards of the attic, directly above their daughter’s bedroom. BBC report said that the bees spent 8 months to construct their hive. The beekeeper used a thermal camera to examine the walls in the 3-year-old’s bedroom.
“It lit up like Christmas,” Massis Class said.
The beekeeper, now dubbed “monster hunter” by the relieved child, was astonished by the discovery. The hive stretched far deeper into the wall than he’d ever encountered before. Following a trail that led to a tiny coin-sized hole in an attic vent, he carefully opened the wall, revealing a colossal honeycomb teeming with life.
The beekeeper has removed between 55,000 and 65,000 bees and 100lb 45kg of honeycomb, BBC reported.
Mrs Class estimates the bees have caused more than $20,000 in damages.
