Something was buzzing in this house.
A couple in England got a not-so-sweet surprise when they discovered their home had turned into a beehive.
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When honey started dripping down the walls of their home, Kate Dempsey, 41, initially assumed it was just damp, but the sweet-smelling aroma sparked curiosity and she decided to pull up the floorboards.
What she found was un-bee-lievable.
“It all started in the really hot summer last year. We noticed black sticky stuff coming down our bedroom wall,” Kate told SWNS. “It got to the point where we couldn’t ignore it anymore. I smelt it and tasted it and it was honey.”
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When Kate and her husband Andrew, 42, first moved into their home, they had seen bees, but didn’t think anything of it since they disappeared and they had the house repainted.
Eventually, the couple discovered six-foot huge pieces of honeycomb and liters of honey, as well as maggots and moths.
“We started pulling more and more, there just seemed to be no end, it was absolutely disgusting,” Kate shared. “We’d never seen anything like it. The sheer volume of the hive was huge. We kept cutting these floorboards away and more and more honeycomb kept appearing.”
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She tried to find a company to get rid of all the honeycomb, but was quoted up to over $12,000 — so the couple gathered some friends and decided to take on the project on their own.
They started by scooping all the honey out by hand — while wearing rubber gloves, of course — and over the course of four weeks removed all the honeycomb from under the floorboards.
“We kept finding more and more, there’s a bit of roof above our window and that was full of golden honey too,” Kate said. “You can imagine the mess. It was horrendous.”
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They had filled 20 “massive” trash bags with honey, though the honey wasn’t edible since a lot of the honeycomb had been attacked by moths.
“Had it been a live honeycomb, we would have got local beekeepers in to extract and relocate it,” she said. “But we were in a bit of a pickle because we couldn’t get anyone to take it unless we paid a huge cost, and they also would have exterminated the bees which we wanted to avoid.”
But the trouble didn’t end there.
“When we were in the middle of [clearing it out], we woke up one morning and the room was full of bees,” Kate said.
A swarm of “robber bees” — honey bees that invade other hives to rob them of their honey — tried to get a taste of that sweet honey for themselves, but luckily no one got stung.
“We called local beekeepers for help and one came to look – he said that they were robber bees and they had come to the nest to steal the honey. He said use marigold gloves because the bees can’t sting through them, and to wear lots of layers,” she shared.
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“But the beekeeper showed the pattern of behavior — the bees flying in through hole in wall, getting the honey, and flying straight out through window again — so the bees weren’t that interested in any of us anyway,” Kate continued.
Kate now encourages people to check their houses and not to ignore anything they might find suspicious.
“I was really worried about the scale of how much damage could have been caused. I have no idea [how long it was there] but it would have taken a very long time,” she said.
“We didn’t realize the amount of damage they caused, and it occurred to us that our story can help other people and make them aware,” Kate continued. “We’d been so preoccupied sorting it all out after they were removed, that it didn’t cross our minds until now.”