Josh Hafner

USA TODAY

A request for a roofing job at a fixer-upper in Texas led a homeowner to a sticky discovery: Honey dripping down the walls in thin lines, forming sticky, syrupy puddles on the floor.

The cause: Bees, of course. About 50,000 of them, Latanja Levine told Texas’ KIAH, swarming the spaces above the ceiling of her two-story home near Houston.

"It's coming in from the ceiling, down to the walls," Leveine said on KIAH’s NewsFix last week . "I'm mopping it up, mopping in the walls. It's all over the curtains here— just honey. They're probably ruined.”

"When I looked, it's going to other walls and coming through other places and you can see it's coming through cracks and crevices in the crown molding," she said.

See the footage of her oozing walls.

Levine had no idea the home had a bee problem until roofers notified her. Professionals tried a non-lethal method to remove them.



“They smoked them out and put them directly into their colonies. There must've been 50,000 bees,” Lee said, adding that “I asked them if they got the Queen bee, and they said, ‘No.’”

Honey-soaked homes aren’t unheard of: In Arizona, Scottsdale resident Kelsie Hughes tried to change the battery in her hallway smoke detector only to discover it honey covering its inside.



"Oh no,” she told 3TV News last month , “because if it traveled this far, where did it come from and how many bees are up there?"



There, up her attic, she found gobs of honey running in long rows.



"There's got to be five to six pounds of honey in the ceiling," Hughes told the station. "That equates to about 60 to 70,000 bees. That's terrifying to even comprehend that many bees in your house."



Luckily for Hughes, she also found dozens of dead bees in the attic, a hint that the hive wasn’t active. She still said it would cost perhaps thousands of dollars to repair the bee-induced mess.



About 110,000 bees infested the elderly care assessment unit of a Welsh hospital last August, the BBC reported . Patients at Cardiff’s Rookwood Hospital watched the ward’s walls dripping with honey, which staffers tried to mop up with towels.

Abigail Reade of the Tree Bee Society, a nonprofit that handles removal, told the BBC that a normal colony contains roughly 50,000 bees. The one in elderly care unit, however, had up to 70,000 bees and had grown over about five years, according to the BBC.

Follow Josh Hafner on Twitter: @joshhafner

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