A couple has discovered a giant beehive inside their home after spotting honey dripping down their bedroom wall. Kate Dempsey, 41, and her husband Andrew Dempsey, 42, noticed dark patches on their floorboards which they initially dismissed as damp.
But then after smelling a "sweet, sickly stench", Kate couldn't ignore it and decided to rip up her floorboards. She then discovered several six-foot long pieces of honeycomb and litres of honey making up a giant beehive under their home.
The couple said the 'insane' discovery at their home in Folkestone, Kent took four weeks to completely remove, which they did themselves with the help of some friends.
READ MORE:
Kate, a diversity and inclusion advisor, said: “It all started in the really hot summer last year. We noticed black sticky stuff coming down our bedroom wall.
“It got to the point where we couldn’t ignore it anymore. I smelt it and tasted it and it was honey. I didn’t have any idea what was going on.
“We’d never seen anything like it. The sheer volume of the hive was huge. We kept cutting these floorboards away and more and more honeycomb kept appearing.
“The smell hit you immediately. It was this sweet stench and we had this really sickly smell for ages - [I just felt] disbelief really.”
The couple also encountered some bees once they'd pulled up the floorboards.
Kate said: "We’d spotted bees when we first moved in but they disappeared, and we’d had the house repainted.
“I went to our daughter’s room which is above ours and pulled back the carpet. These massive maggots started crawling out of the floorboards.
“We decided we were going to pull up the floorboards and see what was going on. We found an old hive and it was almost composting, loads of moths were coming out.
“We started pulling more and more, there just seemed to be no end, it was absolutely disgusting.
“We pulled up this massive six-foot honeycomb. When we were in the middle of [clearing it out], we woke up one morning and the room was full of bees."
Kate added: “We called local beekeepers for help and one came to look – he said that they were robber bees and they had come to the nest to steal the honey.
"He said use marigold gloves because the bees can’t sting through them, and to wear lots of layers.
"But the beekeeper showed the pattern of behaviour - the bees flying in through hole in wall, getting the honey, and flying straight out through window again - so the bees weren’t that interested in any of us anyway.
"We went in at dusk too which the beekeeper suggested, as there were only a few bees left at that time."
The couple were quoted up to £10,000 when they tried to find a company to clean up all the honeycomb.
Instead, along with some friends, they decided to tackle the problem themselves and began scooping the sticky honey out by hand.
It took them four weeks in total to remove all the honeycomb from under the floor.
Kate said: “We kept finding more and more, there’s a bit of roof above our window and that was full of golden honey too. You can imagine the mess. It was horrendous.
“We took it to the tip in big bags, there was 20 massive bin bags full of honey. The honey wasn’t edible, a lot of the comb had been attacked by moths.
"Had it been a live honeycomb, we would have got local beekeepers in to extract and relocate it, but we were in a bit of a pickle because we couldn’t get anyone to take it unless we paid a huge cost, and they also would have exterminated the bees which we wanted to avoid.
“I was really worried about the scale of how much damage could have been caused. I have no idea [how long it was there] but it would have taken a very long time.
“It took us about four weeks in total to remove all the honey but all of us were really keen to try our best not to disrupt the bees or kill any.
"We didn’t realise the amount of damage they caused, and it occurred to us that our story can help other people and make them aware."
Sign up to our free weekly property newsletter by clicking here
READ NEXT:
Huge £2.5m mansion for sale in Greater Manchester with NINE bedrooms
This tiny terrace house is one of Greater Manchester's cheapest homes
First-time buyers have just weeks left to take advantage of government loan scheme
Immaculate three-bed terrace in Greater Manchester with bargain price tag
'We gave our £265,000 period property a quirky makeover - now we've got a disco office'
