DINNER PARTY INTEL: Monsters under the bed? No, bees in the wall

1. Carrying SA’s load

Nicolaas du Preez, 30, who is 1.81m tall and weighs 132kg, may be the strongest man in South Africa. The soft-spoken zoologist from Potchefstroom came second in last week’s international barbell lifting competition in Dublin. But there’s no-one to touch him at home in lifting weights. In 2019, he became the first South African to lift a ton.

2. Indecent on the dunes

A group of tourists to Namibia face being blacklisted by that country after they shared photos and videos of themselves posing naked at one of the top local attractions, the Big Daddy dune in the Namib at Sossusvlei. Kenneth Nependa, vice-chair of the Federation of Namibian Tourism Associations, called it “a bad image for Namibia”, adding that it was a site visited by families.

3. Scary but sweet dreams

For months, Saylor Class, 3, complained to her parents about monsters in her room. After thinking it was a figment of her imagination, her parents took her seriously — but called in a beekeeper rather than an exorcist. He found tens of thousands of bees that had made a hive in a wall of Saylor’s room in the Class family’s 100-year-old house in Charlotte, North Carolina. The beekeeper took away between 50,000 and 60,000 bees and a 45kg honeycomb.