Woman Hearing A Mysterious Buzzing Under Her Floorboards Had To Call For Help

What was once just a dull hum had slowly climbed in volume, and now the crescendo of noise was too powerful to ignore. Denial will only take you so far, and the roar inside this woman’s house had grown louder and louder over the past few months. It wasn’t the noise a house makes when it’s settling. This sounded alive, and it was coming from right under her bed. She had to call someone before it was too late.

Raising alarm

Strange noises in a property aren’t unusual, of course. When a creaking or clanking breaks the silence, it’s usually pipes or the house’s foundations. But there’s always a little part of you that instinctively thinks: what if it’s not? What if there’s something more to those sounds than your rational brain is telling you?

Something alive

Your childhood memories are likely to be partially responsible. Maybe you recall what it’s like to be afraid of the monsters in the closet and the things that go bump in the night. But it wasn’t a lurking boogeyman or a ghost that disturbed the woman in her Louisiana home in 2017. These noises sounded alive.

Under the bed

Perhaps the most terrifying thing is that the troubling sounds were coming from underneath the Louisianan’s bed. Nor was it the first time she had heard the cacophony. In fact, she’d experienced it seven months back and requested help back then, too. The person who answered was the very same man.

Calling for help

So who are you gonna call? Well, 1980s references aside, the man who stepped up is a guy called Jeff Horchoff. Perhaps you’ve heard of him — his life’s calling has made him quite famous. Anyway, Horchoff works for a Benedictine monastery, where his talents make him useful to the abbey.

The man with the plan

By now, you’re probably thinking that Horchoff is an exorcist or something. He has several skills, but no, that’s not one of them. In fact, among his other abilities, he’s a woodworker. The handyman’s YouTube channel explains that he operates “in their woodworking shop building caskets.” It’s a transferable skill for his other line of work.

A handy side hustle

It was this second vocation that led Horchoff to his residential callout. He described as much in his initial video documentation on YouTube in 2017 under the name Mr. Ed. He said, “I’m in Metairie, Louisiana, which is about 38 miles from the abbey. To get here you have to cross Lake Pontchartrain.”

Crossing the lake

Horchoff described Lake Pontchartrain as “the lake that separates New Orleans… [from] the Northshore.” He continued, “It… [also has] the longest [single-span] bridge in the world over water. So that’s, like, the claim… [to] fame for the Lake Pontchartrain causeway.” Of course, the handyman wasn’t just sightseeing; he had a job to do.

Investigating the floorboards

Perhaps the strangest part of the job for Horchoff was that he usually works outdoors. In this case, though, his client was reporting issues inside. They’d even removed the carpet by the time Horchoff arrived. All that remained was to investigate the floorboards, from which the mysterious noises were emanating.

Thermal detecting reveals

You’d think that the handyman would have to pull up the floorboards to see beneath them, right? Then you wouldn’t have been as prepared as Horchoff was. He was equipped with a thermal imaging camera that revealed heat signatures through the wood. There was something living under the floorboards and the detector was giving off a huge reading.

Just beneath the floor

“Let’s see, there it is,” Horchoff told the camera. “It is a pretty long one that’s just between the floor joists, thankfully.” Being a professional woodworker, the handyman had a cunning plan to reach whatever was lurking underneath. He cut a hatch in the floorboards to lift up the mass on the other side.

Cutting it open

Horchoff described the procedure in his own words. “So the process I’m going to do today is, we’re going to go ahead and actually just cut between the floor joists. ...And I’m going to put some handles on the piece of plywood and then I’m going to cut through it.”

What's that buzzing?

So the real question is, what is Horchoff’s other job? And what did he find under the woman’s floorboards? Well, it’s a critter that many people like, but wouldn’t want buzzing en masse around their bed at night. We are, of course, referring to bees! Horchoff is an abbey beekeeper.

Directing the hive

You might be asking yourself how handles can help extract bees. Well, as is clear from a clip posted to YouTube, in this case the hive is actually on the underside of the floorboards. So in theory, when Horchoff pulls the boards up using his installed handles, the whole hive should come with it. Then it can be supported using woodworking sawhorses.

Putting the plan into action

Taking no chances, in the clip Horchoff dons his beekeeper suit and gets to work on the wooden struts. The first step is to prepare the floorboard for removal. Just as he described, the beekeeper cuts through the board so he can lift it up. Horchoff then moves on to the lynchpin ‒ or rather, the handles ‒ of his plan.

Simple but genius

Horchoff’s handles are nothing special; just a pair of them drilled into the joist. Their use, though, is quite innovative. Horchoff sets up the sawhorses to support the removed floorboard and simply lifts the plank up with the handles. It isn’t a boogeyman lurking beneath the bed, but it is just as terrifying.

The wild sight

In the footage, the beekeeper turns the board over to reveal a huge waxy construct covered with moving shapes. It’s the source of all the noise – a massive beehive swarming with drones. “Well there you go, how about that,” Horchoff exclaims. “Got that piece out in one section, unbelievable.”

Not all at once

Horchoff gets the hive out in almost one section, anyway. “There’s only two pieces that fell on the ground right there,” he elaborates. “And there’s two that broke off inside the hole. Other than that the whole hive’s intact, and I’m sure that queen is all up in there.” Talk about a needle in a haystack.

Searching for the queen

Horchoff is a professional, though, and knows exactly how to find the queen. He carefully cuts the hive up into sections and each one of them is placed in a wooden lattice – or “framed” – before being placed into a sealed box. This is a beekeeping technique that’s used for various purposes, including transporting hives, harvesting honey and assessing the insects’ health.

Bee vacuum

As for the bees themselves, don’t worry; Horchoff doesn’t wrangle them individually. That would be tough even with a very small lasso. Instead, he uses a bee vacuum, which harmlessly sucks up bees and deposits them with the hive. The process also allows beekeepers to look for the hive’s queen bee.

Capture the queen

And that’s exactly what happens here. In the clip Horchoff finds the queen during the vacuum procedure and captures her separately from the others. She’s a big one too, as the man himself describes. He says, “That queen was so big that even a dirt rooster could have seen her.” Not while it was surrounded by a swarm of drones, it couldn’t!

The buzzing returns

That was what happened at Horchoff’s callout the first time around. But as we know, that wasn’t the end of the story. The homeowner made another call when buzzing disturbed her once more. It came from roughly the same spot, and so the beekeeper made a return trip to investigate.

The swarm's new spot

“I went to scout the job back in late August,” Horchoff wrote on YouTube. “And I was expecting to find the bees in the same spot that I pulled them from in March. However, they were located in the wall space directly below from where I removed them previously.” Although the swarm didn’t stay there.

Moving around the property

When Horchoff came to remove the bees, they’d already shifted. “What happened in that three months’ time was that the bees had migrated up to exactly the same position where I pulled bees out of here seven months ago,” he explained. That actually made the beekeeper’s job easier, as he reveals in another YouTube post.

The solution

In the new clip Horchoff explains, “They’re in the same spot and they’re in the floor space between floor joists. It’s in the same spot. So I’m just going to unscrew the screws that are holding the piece of plywood down and, once again, just lift up the whole hive.” It wasn’t the ideal season for a bee removal, but people were at risk.

Avoiding the sting

You see, the woman who called in Horchoff explained that the neighbors had children who played close to the hive. So Horchoff had to remove the bees in case the little ones got stung. With that in mind, he headed into the property and straight to the bedroom where he had previously performed the initial removal.

Repeating the process

Inside, Horchoff removes the carpet again and attaches handles to the floorboard once more. The procedure is just the same as last time; once the board is sawn through, Horchoff lifts and flips it. And sure enough, there is another huge hive attached to the underside of the floor panel.

Bigger than ever

Once the hive is on sawhorses Horchoff can admire his handiwork. “There it is folks,” he exclaims, “it worked very well. Took the whole hive out in one piece.” Just as the beekeeper suspected, the hive is freshly built. He reveals, “I was worried about that comb breaking off of it because I knew it was all brand new.”

The access point

All that remains is a few little comb pieces where the swarm has built their hive. Horchoff’s camera reveals how you can even see light filtering in from outside where the bees have gained access. But the queen herself still eludes him, so finding her with the bee vacuum is Horchoff’s next task.

Back to the hunt

As Horchoff segments the comb, he vacuums bees up as he goes. So it’s only a matter of time before he locates the queen herself. He explains, “It was [almost] a given if you’re able to pull that hive out in one piece like that you’re pretty much guaranteed you can get that queen.”

No harm done

As for the hive itself, Horchoff doesn’t just destroy it. Instead, he frames combs up in the order he dissects them to prepare them for transportation. By this point, you’re probably wondering what happens to the queen and hive afterwards. Well, that’s actually one of the reasons Horchoff has become so popular.

The bee's next stop

The beekeeper takes both hive and queen back to his Abbey. Its monks benefit from wax and honey, while Horchoff’s clients can carry on their lives bee-free. In the second clip he even provides an update on how the previous removal’s queen and workers are faring. “The sisters that were here before are doing fantastic at the abbey right now,” Horchoff reported.

Saving the bees

The fact that Horchoff goes to such effort to keep the bees alive is commendable. That’s because these creatures are sadly on the decline. And that’s not just bad for their species: it’s detrimental to our continued existence. You see, the bees play a key role in the Earth’s ecosystem.

Crucial creatures

To begin with, beehives produce food. Alongside their famous honey, bees provide royal jelly, too. They’re also crucial in the pollination process, and we’re not just talking flowers here. When you see their fuzzy butts among the petals, bees are pollinating our crops and food, too. In fact, they’re responsible for the vast majority of it.

Pollinating power

According to a 2021 National Geographic magazine article, bees pollinate 85 percent of the world’s grown produce. There are more species than you might think, too ‒ roughly 20,000 of them to be exact. There used to be a lot more too, but bee numbers have been dropping dramatically.

Drastic decline

For example, in the years from 2006 to 2015 there were 25 percent fewer bee species reported. People are now trying to improve bee numbers. But a biologist for Argentina’s Institute for Research on Biodiversity and the Environment, Eduardo Zattara, revealed that the insects are still at risk. It’s unclear to what extent, though.

The global answer

Zattara headed a study published in the journal One Earth to get a clearer picture of the issue. He told National Geographic, “There’s no long-term, very accurate, precise sampling of bees all over the world. We wanted to see if we could use this kind of data to get a more global answer, and the answer we got is: yes.”

The cause

Although it’s still impossible to say which species have become extinct, Zattara revealed, “What we can say is that wild bees are not exactly thriving.” So what’s the cause of the catastrophe? There are several reasons, from invasive species to disease, but one of the biggest threats is you. Well, perhaps not you personally.

The human impact

But as urban areas expand, it’s leaving less habitat for bees. And when they do have fields to pollinate, certain pesticides designed to kill crop-destroying bugs and insects are also contributing to bee extinction. That’s not to mention the fluctuating weather patterns that climate change is causing which play havoc with bee activities.

What to do

The real question remains: what can we do about it? You can do your part for the bees by making sure your garden is bee-friendly. Plant plenty of flowers they like, install bee hotels and opt for bee relocation instead of extermination. Horchoff’s certainly doing his part, and now it’s your turn to “bee” kind.