Walls Oozing Honey Make for Killer Bee Tale

Mira Davoodian was beginning to think her house was haunted. First, strange scratching and buzzing sounds came from somewhere in the roof. Then, her air conditioner mysteriously stopped working. Finally, a few days ago, gobs of sticky goo began oozing inexplicably from the ceiling of an upstairs bedroom.

On Saturday, a flabbergasted Davoodian discovered that her problem wasn’t ghosts after all. It was bees--swarms of them.

Unbeknownst to Davoodian, the bees had made their way through a tiny hole in the roof of her two-story townhouse and then spent several years building large honeycombs in the rafters.

The massive output of honey not only clogged the townhome’s air-conditioning unit, but the busy bees were keeping Davoodian and her 21-year-old daughter up at night.

“We could never sleep,” said the 60-year-old Russian immigrant. “I’d wake up all of the time because I would hear noises. I thought maybe there was rats up there then I started to think maybe it was a ghost. Then I thought maybe it was just in my head.”

Two workers from The Bee Man, a Laguna Niguel beehive removal company, cut a hole in the wall where honey had been seeping through and found more than 100 pounds of honeycombs, thousands of dead bees, and a few rats.

Marci Laurvick , a board member of the Rancho Yorba Townhomes Assn., said rat poisoning spread recently by Davoodian’s son not only killed the rats, but also the bees. As a result, the honeycombs collapsed and the honey began seeping through the roof.

She said the association will pay for the bee removal.

“It’s pretty amazing but it’s not quite ‘Amityville Horror,’ ” Laurvick said, alluding to the 1970s horror film about a haunted house. “We’ve had bee problems in a few of our units but nothing quite like this.”

Meanwhile, a relieved Davoodian looked on as the workers removed the gooey mess from her ceiling.

“I like honey,” she said, laughing. “But not this much honey.”