When Ashley Massis Class’s oldest child kept telling her she heard “monsters” in her bedroom wall she and her husband chalked it up to the girl’s imagination as they had been watching Monster’s Inc. and they figured she meant “monsters in her closet.” They reassured her the closet was empty and even gave her a spray bottle filled with water (aka “monster spray.”). But when the toddler started getting nightmares and refused to sleep in her room, insisting there were monsters, they thought maybe she was needing extra attention with the arrival of the new baby. Then, they noticed a few bees entering their attic.
The family live in a 100-year-old farmhouse so they decided to call a pest control company to investigate. They were told the bees were honey bees and as they are endangered they would not be sprayed. A beekeeper would need to be called.
A few beekeepers came and told them the bees were not yet in the house. But one observant beekeeper noticed the bees going down into the floorboards of the attic. What was below? Their daughter’s bedroom.
Ashley shared what happened next on her now viral TikTok video captioned, “What nightmares are made of.”
@classashley What nighthmares are made of #bees #toddlersoftiktok #toddlers ♬ Oh No – Kreepa
The beekeeper’s thermal camera revealed the bedroom wall filled with bees! The beekeeper suspected it was 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,” Ashley told PEOPLE. “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.”
What followed has been 10 days of extracting the honeybees, including the queen, and relocating them to a bee sanctuary. The beekeeper and the family were astounded by the size of the hive. Several days of work and over 60,000 bees have been taken out of the walls. Not only that, but the beekeeper removed a 100 pound chunk of honeycomb that had to be triple bagged because it was so heavy!
People have asked Ashley how they could not have noticed the bees and she explained why the infestation was highly unusual in a follow up video. Apparently, the bees worked their way downward into a part of a well insulated sealed-off chimney. Bees do not tend to bury and build downwards and despite the huge size of the honeycomb it was 8 months work.
@classashley Replying to @cantthinkofaUsername How did they get in?/Why we didn’t notice them #savethebees #bees #charlotte #honeycomb ♬ original sound – Ashley
Ashley has chronicled “Bee Gate” and showed how her daughter’s bedroom is covered in honey and bee residue. She also said that luckily the hive was contained to the one room in the house, which is a good thing since her insurance company has said they will not cover repair costs.
As for her daughter, Ashley and her husband have reassured their daughter about the entire situation.
Ashley said, “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.”
And even though her daughter can’t go back to her bedroom for several more weeks until the clean up and repairs are finished, Ashley said on TikTok that her daughter is looking forward to redecorating her bedroom.
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