Page 14 - IAV Digital Magazine #593

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
A Little Girl Said Monsters Were In Her Bedroom. It Was 60,000 Bees
By Rachel Looker, BBC News
When three-year- old Saylor Class began complain- ing of monsters in her bedroom, her parents thought it was just a figment of a child's overac- tive imagination.
But then a bee- keeper discov- ered tens of thou- sands of honey- bees above the girl's bedroom.
Saylor had com- plained of "mon- sters in the wall" of her room at their farmhouse in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Her mother, Ashley Massis Class, and her husband thought nothing of it.
They had after all just shown their daughter 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 mon- sters at night," said Ms Massis Class, a home designer.
But over the fol- lowing months, Saylor became more insistent that there was something in her closet.
It began to make more sense when Ms Massis Class noticed
bees swarming in clusters near the attic and chimney outside their 100- year-old house.
They thought Saylor might be hearing the buzzing near her bedroom ceiling.
Ms Massis Class called a pest con- trol company that found the winged insects were hon- eybees, a pro- tected species in the US.
She and her hus- band contacted a beekeeper who noticed the insects were trav- elling towards the floorboards of the attic - right above her daughter's bedroom.
The bees had spent eight months building the monster hive.
The beekeeper brought a thermal camera to scan the walls in the
three-year-old's bedroom.
"It lit up like Christmas," Ms Massis Class said.
The beekeeper said he had never seen a hive go that far down into the wall.
He tracked it to a coin-sized hole in the corner of an attic vent.
The beekeeper - whom Massis Class's daughter began calling the monster hunter - opened the wall to reveal a large honeycomb.
"They just came pouring out like a horror movie," Ms Massis Class said.
The beekeeper has removed between 55,000 and 65,000 bees and 100lb (45kg) of honeycomb.
There have been three extractions by reverse vacu- uming the insects out of the wall to put them into boxes. The insects are being relocated to a honeybee sanc- tuary.
Ms Massis Class has had to screen off the room between extractions to prevent the bees from buzzing around her home.
The honeybees and their honey damaged the house's electric wiring, Ms Massis Class said.
She said her homeowner's insurance won't cover anything pest-related because they deem it preventa- ble.
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iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine