It started in September 2023, when my daughter Saylor was three years old. She began having trouble sleeping, and said there were monsters in her closet. She could hear a hum in the wall. We thought it was because she loved the movie Monsters, Inc, given it’s about monsters who visit children’s bedrooms at night. We calmed her down by giving her a bottle of water, which we called monster spray.

But soon she was scared again. By February, she was back in our room. Later that month, I saw a giant cluster of bees buzzing by the attic laundry vent outside the house. I was pregnant with our third child, exhausted, and thought I was hallucinating.

A beekeeper came to take a look, and said everything was fine. A second beekeeper said the same.

It took a third beekeeper to figure it out. He noticed that the bees were flying into the attic floorboards, and asked what was underneath them: it was Saylor’s bedroom. He scanned the attic floor with a thermal camera, but couldn’t see anything. He then said, “This has never happened in my 30-plus years, but let’s try the walls.” When he put the camera on Saylor’s bedroom wall, the screen lit up like Christmas lights.

That’s when we saw it: a shape more than 6ft tall. It looked like a man in a top hat. I was stunned.

It turns out bees were crawling into our attic from a tiny hole in a window. They then slipped through the floorboards and built a giant hive in the cavity in the wall.

The beekeeper wanted to open up the wall with a hammer. While my husband stayed with him, I remained downstairs with our Saylor and her brother, as I’m allergic to bees.

I heard the beekeeper say, “Oh my God, take cover.” My husband ran out of the room. He said it was like a horror movie: bees pouring out, flying everywhere. It was pandemonium.

The beekeeper used a contraption with a vacuum attachment to gently extract bees. That day, he removed 40,000 bees and pulled out more than 100lb (45kg) of honeycomb from our wall. He’d never seen anything like it.

The whole process took hours and the captured bees were buzzing loudly. We showed Saylor the box they were in and asked if that was the noise she’d been hearing. She said, “Yep, that’s the monsters.” She seemed vindicated; it was as if she was thinking, “You guys are idiots. This is what I’ve been talking about.”

It turns out the prime time for bees is between midnight and 4am. We were putting Saylor to bed at 7pm. We had been at such a loss as to how to help her – nobody thought it was because there were thousands of bees in our wall.

When the beekeeper came out in his bee suit, I was worried she would get scared. I told her that this was the beekeeper, but she said, “No, that’s a monster hunter.” She was excited to see him. Every time he came, she asked, “You got more?”

Everything in her room was covered in honey – books, blankets, toys. The beekeeper said lots of the bees would be out pollinating, so there would be more coming back at night. He made a hole in the wall and sealed it, and said he would return in two weeks. There would also be robber bees, which eat the honey after the honeycomb has been extracted.

Two weeks later, he took out another 20,000 bees. Two weeks after that, another 10,000.

He was finally able to seal up the hole in July. We had to pay $20,000 (£15,000) to repair the damage, and had to get a loan as our insurance wouldn’t cover it. They saw the damage as preventable, even though the beekeeper said it was a “once-in-a-lifetime” event.

It’s all fixed now, but sometimes I worry the bees will come back. After the work was finished, Saylor didn’t want anything to do with her old room. I don’t blame her. We made it into a nursery for my son.

Sometimes I catch myself feeling the walls in that room, just to make sure there’s nothing there. Thankfully, I don’t think Saylor is scared of bees. She seems indifferent to them.

The beekeeper ended up taking the bees to his apiary. Bees are endangered, and people are trying to increase the population. I think it’s safe to say we’ve done our part.

As told to Isabelle Aron

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