Parents Ignore 3-Year-Old's 'Monster in the Bedroom' Story ... Everything Changes When They Bring in a Thermal Camera
Editor’s Note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re reposting it here in case you missed it.
There were no monsters, just a monstrous infestation of bees that kept a 3-year-old up at night.
The tale began when the girl told her parents her room had monsters.
“She was saying she heard monsters in her bedroom wall, but we’d been watching ‘Monsters Inc.,’” Ashley Class, the girl’s mom, said, according to People on April 26. “She was a little speech delayed, so when she tried explaining it, we thought she meant there were monsters in her closet.”
“We told her, ‘Nobody is in that closet.’ We made jokes about fighting the monster. We gave her a spray bottle full of water that was her monster spray,” she said, noting that things got worse instead of better.
A girl complained to her parents for months that there were monsters in her bedroom walls. It turned out that there was a hive of 60,000 bees. pic.twitter.com/XwUir14Dsh
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) April 30, 2024
Around the same time, they noted an unusual number of bees around their house in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“With a 100-year-old farmhouse, we have found any little thing that can happen. But this was beyond our expectations,” Class said, according to Good Morning America.
Beekeeper Curtis Collins was called in.
“I knew they were there. It’s just a matter of where they were making their hive,” he said. Collins used a thermal imaging camera to find what was between the walls.
“I believe that may be actually the first one that I’ve done that was floor to ceiling,” Collins said.
“It lit up like Christmas,” Ashley Class said, according to the BBC.
“At first, I thought it was a body,” she said. “I was like, ‘What is that?’ And he says he thinks it’s a hive. He didn’t even have his bee gear on yet, but he took a hammer and knocked into the wall. 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,” she said.
“When he opened it up, they were, I guess, just swarming around our room. We didn’t even have time to get any of her stuff out of the room,” she said, according to Good Morning America.
Various reports have put the number of bees removed between 50,000 and 65,000. The removal is expected to continue for several weeks.
Ashley Class said her toddler felt vindicated.
“We told her, ‘We found the monsters, you were right.’ Then we introduced her to the beekeeper and she was like, ‘No, he’s a monster hunter.’ So she called him Mr. Monster Hunter for the rest of the day, which was awesome,” she said.
The repair cost of about $20,000 is also awesome, as is the cleanup required for the die-off that took place after the queen bee was taken to a bee sanctuary.
“We’ve had a couple of thousand that died because their queen is no longer here, so that’s sad. We’ve been leaving the window open, hoping the remaining ones fly out, but many will die without being able to smell the queen, as I understand,” Ashley Class said.
“So we’ve been cleaning up thousands of dead bees every single day, and I’ve learned that bees can still sting you when they’re dead. It’s like a landmine, with thousands on the floor. We have to wear rubber boots to walk around and not get stung,” she said.
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