A toddler told her mom that “monsters” were in her closet. But in fact, there were more than 50,000 bees there.
A mother of three children under four years old was met with a “terrifying” surprise after she and her husband investigated why a handful of bees had flown into the attic of the couple’s North Carolina home.
After a visit by a pest control company and multiple beekeepers, a thermal camera finally revealed where the bees had gone – to a massive hive they had built inside the wall of her daughter’s room, where the girl was convinced she had heard a monster of some kind lurking.
“At first, I thought it was a body,” Ashley Massis Class told People magazine recently. “I was like, ‘What is that?’ And he says he thinks it’s a hive.”
For roughly eight months, a swarm of honeybees had been building a hive inside the wall of her daughter’s room.
The beekeeper “didn’t even have his bee gear on yet, but he took a hammer and knocked into the wall”, Massis Class recalled. “Bees came swarming out like a horror movie.
“There were streams of bees, and the wall where he hit was oozing honey. But it looked like blood because it was really, really dark, running down my daughter’s pink walls. It looked really strange.”
Beekeepers ultimately removed tens of thousands of bees over several extractions, and a honeycomb weighing more than 100lb.
The bees were relocated to a bee sanctuary. Massis Class first documented the experience on TikTok, where her story went viral and caught the attention of news outlets.
After the extractions, Massis Class reassured her daughter that “Mr Monster Hunter”, as the toddler called the beekeeper, was removing all the bees. She also reassured her daughter that, after many months, the family now believed her.
There was, in fact, a kind of monster in her wall.
In addition to the work to remove the bees, there will also be repairs to Massis Class’s home. The bees and their oozing honey caused about $20,000 worth of damage to electrical wires, which the family homeowner’s insurance will not cover.
The timing of their bee encounter was a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, Massis Class and her husband had a baby before discovering the bees.
Yet Massis Class told People that meant the couple was on leave from work.
“I’m really thankful my husband and I are on leave right now and that we can deal with this situation,” she remarked. “But at the same time, hearing the sound of humming bees on the other side of a door is kind of terrifying.”
• This story was amended on 1 May 2024 to remove references to honeybees being endangered.
