She felt there were 'monsters' in her room. It was a colony of 60,000 bees

When three-year-old Saylor Class started expressing concerns about monsters in her bedroom, her parents initially dismissed it as a typical product of a child's vivid imagination. However, their perspective shifted when a beekeeper found tens of thousands of honeybees above the girl's bedroom. Saylor had been mentioning "monsters in the wall" of her room at their farmhouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. Initially, her mother, Ashley Massis Class, and her husband didn't pay much attention to it, considering they had recently watched 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 monsters at night," Massis Class, a home designer told the BBC.

However, in the following months, Saylor grew increasingly adamant about something being inside her closet. Massis Class started connecting the dots when she observed bees gathering in groups around the attic and the chimney outside their century-old residence. They began to suspect that Saylor might have been hearing the buzzing noise near her bedroom ceiling.

Massis Class reached out to a pest control company, which determined that the winged insects were honeybees, a species protected in the US. Afterwards, she and her husband got in touch with a beekeeper who observed the insects moving towards the floorboards of the attic, directly above their daughter's bedroom. These bees had spent eight months constructing their hive. The beekeeper utilised a thermal camera to examine the walls in the three-year-old's bedroom.

"It lit up like Christmas," Massis Class said.

The beekeeper had never seen a hive go so deep into a wall before. He found it started from a tiny hole in the attic vent's corner. The beekeeper, now known as the "monster hunter" by Massis Class's daughter, opened the wall and revealed a big honeycomb.

The beekeeper took out around 55,000 to 65,000 bees and 100 pounds (45 kilogrammes) of honeycomb. They did this three times by vacuuming the bees out of the wall and putting them in boxes to move them to a honeybee sanctuary.

Between these removals, Massis Class had to block off the room to stop the bees from flying around her house. The bees and their honey damaged the house's electrical wiring, but her insurance wouldn't pay for it because they said it could have been avoided.

(With inputs from agencies)