- Listen to your kids — the stories they tell aren’t always made up.
Every child is afraid of a monster under the bed or in the closet at some point. Kids have active imaginations, after all, that can lead them to be scared about nothing.
But what if they’re not making it up? What if there really is something lurking in your child’s bedroom?
That’s the nightmare scenario a North Carolina family recently faced. They weren’t exactly dealing with a monster, but the thing keeping their daughter awake was certainly monstrous.
Specifically, 60,000 bees had built an enormous hive within the little girl’s bedroom walls. The disturbing noises she heard were simply the sounds of thousands of buzzing wings.
Now, the Class family is slowly having an expert beekeeper gradually remove the insects from their home. That process, however, takes time, which has given the family plenty of time to wrangle with a new monster.
That is, the $20,000 of damages the bees have caused to their home.
The Scratches in the Walls
The Class family lives at a 100-year-old farmhouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. A few months ago, their daughter Saylor began complaining about a bizarre phenomenon.
She claimed there were monsters in her bedroom. She said she could hear them growling and scraping inside the walls.
Creepy if not a bit cliché, right? That’s what Saylor’s parents thought as well.
They dismissed her daughter’s fears as a product of a child’s imagination. That was particularly so because they had recently watched Pixar’s Monsters Inc. with their daughter.
Saylor’s mother and father tried to comfort their daughter, telling her she was merely imagining the monsters.
“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,” said Massis Class, Saylor’s mother.
Yet, the little girl just kept getting more insistent that the monsters were real. Over the next few months, she claimed that their noises were getting louder and louder.
Naturally, her parents were concerned. But then they spotted a big cluster of bees outside their home where their chimney met the roof.
Perhaps there was a beehive somewhere creating the noises Saylor heard? To verify their suspicions, the Classes called a beekeeper.
‘I Knew They Were There’
For the inspection, the Classes hired Curtis Collins, a local beekeeper who has been removing the insects from people’s homes for several years. He quickly confirmed that there sure was a beehive somewhere in the Class residence.
“I knew they were there. It’s just a matter of where they were making their hive,” Collins told ABC News.
He discovered that the bees were traveling down the chimney’s exterior and into the floorboards of the farmhouse’s attic.
Of course, that spot was right above Saylor’s bedroom.
So, Collins fetched his thermal camera to locate the hive. In case you didn’t know, a big lump of bees generates quite a bit of heat, so thermal imaging can easily find them.
Collins pointed the camera at Saylor’s bedroom wall. We can only imagine Collins’ and the family’s reaction to the image.
The entire height of the wall glowed with the heat of a ginormous bee swarm.
“I believe that may be actually the first one that I’ve done that was floor to ceiling,” said Collins.
Of course, Collins had to open the wall to be able to work with the insects. As soon as punctured the wall, a swarm of bees poured out in a scene reminiscent of a horror movie.
The Real Monster is Insurance
Currently, the Classes are keeping Saylor’s bedroom firmly shut to keep the bees from infiltrating the rest of the house. Meanwhile, Saylor is sleeping in another room while Collins — whom she calls a “monster hunter” — removes the bees.
It’s a process, though. Collins uses a kind of vacuum to suck the bees out and deposit them in boxes for transport to a honey bee sanctuary.
He can’t vacuum up all the bees at once, however. Over three rounds of treatment, he has so far removed around 60,000 bees from the wall — but there are still more.
Along with the insects, he has pulled a 100-pound honeycomb out of the wall. Yet, the problem should be solved eventually.
Although the bee situation is improving, the Classes now have a new problem. The bees have caused considerable damage to the house, including its electrical wiring, and that’s without mentioning the obvious gaping hole in Saylor’s bedroom wall.
In total, the repairs are going to cost upward of $20,000. The Classes have homeowner’s insurance but — to no one’s surprise — the insurance company won’t pay a dime.
After all, pest-related damage counts as “preventable.” If only the Classes had plugged the previously undiscovered quarter-sized crack in their attic that Collins determined to be the bees’ entry point.
Even with that, however, Mrs. Class sees a silver lining.
“It was really neat to be able to show our 3-year-old: ‘These are the monsters you’ve been hearing. You’re completely right,’” she said.