When 3-year-old Saylor Class of Charlotte, North Carolina, began complaining of monsters in her bedroom, her parents chalked it up to an active imagination and a recent viewing of “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 monsters at night,” Ashley Class, Saylor’s mother and a home designer told “Good Morning America.”
But what Saylor was convinced was a monster turned out to be something smaller in size, but much bigger in numbers.
It started when the family began to see swarms of bees near the attic and noticed they were traveling toward the floorboards above Saylor’s bedroom, Class told BBC News.
A call to a pest control company brought beekeeper Curtis Collins to the Class’s 100-year-old farmhouse. Using a thermal camera, Collins found bees and a hive that measured from the floor to the ceiling in the walls of Saylor’s room.
Before it was over, Collings removed 55,000 - 65,000 bees from the wall of the home. Collins said it would have taken the bees about eight months to build the hive, according to The Guardian.
“I knew they were there. It’s just a matter of where they were making their hive,” said Collins, who has been doing bee hive removals in homes for six years.
The Class family was stunned.
“With a 100-year-old farmhouse, we have found any little thing that can happen. But this was beyond our expectations,” Class told “Good Morning America.”
Class, who shared a TikTok video about the discovery, said the beehive looked “almost like a man in the wall by the shape of it” and her husband, Chris Class, said the hive “took up the entire wall space.”
Class estimates the damage from the honey bees will cost $20,000 which is not covered by insurance.
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