When a three-year-old girl from Charlotte, North Carolina, started complaining to her parents about monsters in the walls of her room, they thought she was imagining things, but there really was something in the walls.
Little Saylor Class had recently watched DreamWorks’ ‘Monster Inc’ animated movie when she started talking to her parents about monsters in the walls, so they didn’t really take her seriously. In fact, they 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,” but her complaints only got stronger over the following months. Saylor’s parents started taking her more seriously when her mother Massis noticed bees swarming near the attic and chimney of their old farmhouse. Massis Class thought the daughter could hear the bees buzzing through the ceiling, but things were even worse than that.
Photo: Rowan Heuvel/Unsplash
Saylor’s parents ended up calling a pest control expert who identified the insects as honeybees, a protected species in the United States. He noticed the insects were traveling towards the floorboards of the attic, right above the little girl’s room, but when he used a thermal camera to scan the walls, a part of the room “lit up like a Christmas tree”.
Because honeybees cannot be harmed under US law, a beekeeper was called to have them and their hive removed. Only it wasn’t a few bees and a bit of honeycomb, but a massive colony stretching from a tiny, coin-sized hole in the attic deep into the walls of the house. The beekeeper told the Class family that he had never seen a beehive go so far down into a wall.
The beekeeper, whom Saylor began calling the “monster hunter”, removed the flying insects by making a hole in the wall and then vacuumed them into special boxes. Many of them simply poured into the room from the wall, so the Class family had to cover as much of the house in plastic film so the bees couldn’t hide.
By the end of the special operation, between 55,000 and 65,000 bees were removed, along with 100lb (45kg) of honeycomb. The bees are to be relocated to a bee sanctuary.
Ms Massis Class told local journalists that the bees and their honey damaged the electric wiring of the house, and she estimated the total cost of repairing everything to be more than $20,000. Insurance will likely not pay any of these costs, as they don’t cover anything pest-related because they deem it preventable.
Such cases are rare, but definitely not unheard of. In 2019, we covered the story of a family in Granada, Spain, who discovered that they had been living with a colony of 80,000 bees in the wall of their bedroom.
