A couple discovered their home was turning into a huge beehive after honey started dripping down their walls.
Kate Dempsey, 41, first thought the dark patches on the walls were caused by damp, but when she noticed a sweet scent in the air she decided to investigate further by pulling up the floorboards at her home in Folkestone, Kent.
You can see footage of the discovery here:
It was here that she discovered huge six-foot pieces of honeycomb and litres of honey.
Advert
Kate said: “It all started in the really hot summer last year. We noticed black sticky stuff coming down our bedroom wall.
“It got to the point where we couldn’t ignore it anymore. I smelt it and tasted it and it was honey.
“I went to our daughter’s room which is above ours and pulled back the carpet. These massive maggots started crawling out of the floorboards.
“We decided we were going to pull up the floorboards and see what was going on. We found an old hive and it was almost composting, loads of moths were coming out.
“We pulled up this massive six-foot honeycomb. When we were in the middle of [clearing it out], we woke up one morning and the room was full of bees."
Advert
She continued: “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 to use marigold gloves because the bees can’t sting through them, and to wear lots of layers.
"But the beekeeper showed the pattern of behaviour - 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."
After making the unusual discovery, Kate and husband Andrew, 42, began to look for a company who could handle the large clean-up job but were quoted a whopping £10,000.
Advert
So, instead they enlisted the help of some pals and did it themselves - with the huge task taking four weeks.
“You can imagine the mess. It was horrendous,” she said.
“We took it to the tip in big bags, there was 20 massive bin bags full of honey. The honey wasn’t edible, a lot of the comb had been attacked by moths.
"Had it been a live honeycomb, we would have got local beekeepers in to extract and relocate it.
Advert
"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."
Kate went on: “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.
“We wanted encourage other people to check their houses, because we ignored ours for a while.
"We didn’t realise the amount of damage they caused, and it occurred to us that our story can help other people and make them aware.
Advert
"We’d been so preoccupied sorting it all out after they were removed, that it didn’t cross our minds until now.”
Claire Reid