| 1 | Do bears really love honey? |
The answer is undoubtedly yes! Many a true word is spoken in jest, and the classic tales of Winnie the Pooh were inspired by very real cases of bear-bee chaos. Ask any beekeeper living in grizzly country (or black bear country) and they’ll tell you that bears regularly come knocking.
Bears have an extremely keen sense of smell, and while this is best suited for scavenging carcasses or tracking down female bears, beehives have a distinctive enough aroma to draw them in. Compared to a human beehive rustler (if such a thing exists), bears have no need to scout buildings and spot the hives clinging to their sides. Bears can leave a trail of utter devastation. If it’s a natural beehive, then the base of the tree will be almost torn apart, and if it’s a manmade beehive, then the lid will be torn off. Honeycomb will be scattered around the apiary, and the hive box will be lying in pieces.
The brown bear’s love for honey operates on a yearly cycle which peaks around spring. When a thin, scraggly bear awakens from hibernation missing 100 pounds in precious body weight, he needs to fatten himself up rapidly. However, neither fish nor the first crops of berries will arrive until summer. Animal carcasses killed by the winter cold are an option, but beehives are irresistible, not least because newly awakened bears are in a state of “walking hibernation” where they’re still slightly sluggish.
| 2 | Do the bears suffer? |
One common question is whether bee stings hurt a bear. Are bears incredibly brave idiots, or are they so bulky and bear-like that bee stings simply bounce off them? The bees always give it a good go when they see a giant grizzly pushing his snout in, but the bear’s only vulnerable spots are its face and nose. A bee sting is 1.5-3mm long on average, which is more than sufficient to penetrate human skin, but a bear’s hide can be 4cm thick. Therefore, a bear really does have an inbuilt armour across its entire body. Bears can withstand hundreds of swarming bear stings in one honey-raiding encounter. It’s also speculated that bears have a far higher pain threshold compared to other mammals.
That said, bears rarely linger with their face in a beehive. Once they’ve gobbled down some bee brood and honey, the bear usually dashes off and shakes the bees from its fur as though shaking off water. Less experienced bears might give up after their first couple of attempts, before getting the hang of it and realising that they’re bears and can’t be hurt very easily.
Bears have been seen in the wild with multiple swollen stings on their faces, or even inside their mouth. The bottom line though, is that this makes no difference to their honey-raiding behaviour. It’s a pure smash and grab strategy with fear never entering the equation.
| 3 | Bears actually eat the entire beehive |
Unlike the cat, whose meat-eating habits caused the sweetness receptors in their tongues to gradually disappear, bears have an abundance of those receptors. Bears are the same as humans – the intense sweetness of honey informs them that it’s an incredibly dense source of energy which will fatten them up to survive the long, hard winter. Honey is 82.4% sugar (split between glucose, fructose, maltose and others) and 17.4% water on average.
But a bear needs more than carbohydrates, and some scientists theorise that bears are actually more interested in the bee brood, a collective term for pre-adult bees found in the hive – eggs, larvae and pupae. This is a dense form of animal protein which bears can easily snatch up. Because a mother bee can lay 1000 to 2000 eggs per day, and the eggs take approximately 21 days to reach adult drone status, the brood can really build up in the hive.
In fact, the pupae have the protein levels of beef or poultry. One recent estimate for the protein level of bee brood larvae was 48.5%, while honey contains only 0.5%. Most brown bears in the wild would laugh at Winnie the Pooh, who often had a sudden look of pain on his face before spitting out the unchewed bees to freedom again. Then again, Winnie and his old friend Yogi may be a more evolved form of bear.
A black bear was once caught stealing 17 pounds of honey from a yard. Who knows what brown bears could achieve?
| 4 | Crazy urban legends |
According to myth-busting websites, the internet was awash with rumours back in the early noughties of two parents visiting Yellowstone park, who smeared their young son’s face with honey. The idea was that the wild bear would lick the honey off the boy’s face and give the family an incredible photo opportunity. Instead, the boy got mauled. The person reporting this was supposedly informed by a park ranger, who was on the verge of tears as the memories came flooding back. Nobody knows whether this happened, but there’s one argument against – that surely nobody could be so stupid?
Another rumour states that wild bears who obsess over honey usually end up with decayed teeth, lying in a cave and cursing the poor decision-making skills of their youth. Honey does erode a bear’s teeth – the original Winnie the Pooh was a black bear called Winnipeg who lived in London zoo, who children fed buckets full of honey for 20 years, which he greedily licked up. Winnipeg’s skull shows heavy signs of gum disease and is missing multiple teeth, but tooth decay in wild brown bears is mainly caused by chewing tough vegetable matter like roots.
It’s impossible for a bear to steal enough honey for his teeth to rot; if he did steal enough, then there’d probably be a G20 conference in London and a SWAT team led by David Attenborough to deal with him.
| 5 | Honey antics from around the world |
Back in 2008, a world first happened when a bear was convicted in a Macedonian court of stealing an innocent man’s honey. Unfortunately, the bear didn’t show up at the courthouse. The beekeeper had tried everything, including playing loud music and installing lights around the beehives, but he forgot to factor in a simple powercut.
After 1 year of futile efforts, the man pressed charges. Because the bear had no owner, it fell to the Macedonian state to pay $3500 worth of compensation. The bear was never arrested, and a more disturbing news story came to light in 2018, when opponents of the Pyrenees bear reintroduction left glass-laced honey by a rural roadside, which was labelled “caution: anti-bear poison”.
The honey was discovered near the town of Bagneres-de-Bigorre on April 20th, in protest at two new female bears who had been released from Slovenia called Franska and Palouma. A roadside search revealed several more deadly jars, and the culprits were identified as two mystery farmers who blamed bears for killing their livestock, and threatening passing hikers.
It was all part of a massive debate, with conservationists insisting that man and bear could co-exist peacefully. Thankfully, their glass-laced scheme didn’t work, and the honey trap was removed. The bear would have suffered agonising bleeding gums and slowly starved to death, seduced by its old favourite of honey. At this point, the Pyrenees had a healthy 20 bears, and as of 2020, the numbers have risen to 52.
| 6 | How do beekeepers protect their hives? |
The main weapon is an electric fence, although some bears are known to charge right through them without batting an eyelid. Bee experts recommend a multi-strand fence rather than a single strand fence, which most bears are easily smart enough to circumvent. Some farmers swear by electric net fencing, divided into squares like a net, to prevent crafty bears from slipping through. Grizzly and black bears alike have shown freakish resistance to some electric fences.
Numerous products are available, but the most common recommendation is a 42 inch fence with 5 parallel wires. Numbers 1, 3, and 5 will be hot wires, flowing with crackling electric charge. Wires 2 and 4 are usually inactive, but important for bolstering the physical defences. Most people choose a charge of 14-15 gauges, but if you want a 1000 gauge spectacular… well, that’s up to you.
There’s several bonus tips and tricks for beekeepers as well, like uprooting weeds growing around the fence, which tend to channel the voltage into the soil, making the fence’s charge weaker. It’s possible that a beekeeper could find his precious hives smashed to pieces and suddenly remember that he’d been neglecting his gardening recently.
Some even recommend baiting a bear with a juicy piece of bacon strapped to the fence. Like people, bears adore the wafting smell of bacon, and when they bite into the fully charged wire, the electric shock will condition them to never return to the apiary, regardless of the alluring beehive smell. That’s the theory anyway!
| 7 | One Turkish guy’s stroke of genius |
Over in Turkey, one beekeeper realised that the only solution to the eternal man-bear battle was to join forces for the greater good of the universe. Throughout 2019, Ibrahim Sedef had tried everything to stop a bear plague, including putting the hives in metal boxes and tactically placing other tasty treats to distract the bear. He had even baked a special loaf of bread, but nothing seemed to work.
One day, however, Sedef had a brainwave. In a lush rural landscape of sweeping hillsides and ancient trees, Sedef placed three types of honey on a wooden table: anzer bali, visne, and cikek gali, alongside one plate of jam. He installed a high tech night vision camera, and walked off, knowing exactly what would happen.
He was right: the next morning, the camera footage showed a large brown bear with glow in the dark eyes turn up. After some deliberation in front of the table, like a Great British Bake-off contestant, the bear finally put its nose towards the Anzer Bali jar and started eating.
Sedef now had the ultimate consumer feedback to deploy: his honey was officially bear certified. Sedef was now the only beekeeper alive who could place a “made in cooperation with bears” label on his jars and not be telling porkies.
Over the previous 3 years, Sedef had lost $10,000 worth of honey to marauding bears, but his heart was now full of forgiveness: “I forget all the harm they have done to me and love them”.
| 8 | Bear/honey statistics |
Bear attacks are no joke. Over the first 5 months of 2018, bear attacks cost beekeepers an estimated 370 hives across Finland and northern Estonia, leading to $143,000 worth of government compensation in Finland. In one apiary 12 miles from the Russian border, a bear returned three times and managed to bypass an electric fence.
It’s different in different countries. Slovenia, for example, is a classic European brown bear hub, and from 2004 to 2014, there was an average of 36 beehive attacks per year, compared with 124 sheep attacks. In Italy meanwhile, where bears are steadily taking over the northern Trentino region, beehive attacks numbered 48 yearly (from 2004 to 2014) compared with 26 sheep attacks.
Austria is another example. From 1989 to 1993, Austria tried to reintroduce its extinct brown bear subpopulation, releasing 5 Slovenian bears into the wild. At first, man and bear lived in harmony, but by 1993, a problem bear called Nurmi was all over the news. In summer 1993, Nurmi destroyed 50 beehives in a clear trail following his known whereabouts, alongside 20 sheep and several rabbits. Nurmi must have been a relative of Winnie the Pooh, and the chaos peaked in the so-called disaster year of 1994, where beehive destructions accounted for 40% of economic damage caused by bears. From 1990 to 1998, bears ransacked 145 beehives across Austria, in 283 separate raids.
| 9 | M13 the honey thief |
If a real life Winnie the Pooh ever walked the Earth in the 21st century, then one candidate was M13 the Swiss bear. He was born in early 2010 in northern Italy, and became famous in 2012 when he strayed over the border to become “Switzerland’s only bear”, although his brother M12 was also roaming nearby. By April 11th, M13 had raided 4 beehives, and on April 16th, he shoved his entire snout into a beehive near the town of Graubünden. Beekeeper Karl Andersag reported a gruesome trail of dead bees and honeycomb left on the ground, and was forced to install an electric fence. In late April, the Italian government was forced to promise beekeepers a cash handout – all because of one bear!
M13 then disappeared for most of the summer, but returned in early August with a raid on beehives in Brusio, eastern Switzerland. On October 12th, he cranked things up a gear when he broke into the apiary of a Swiss school in the town of Poschiavio. He climbed over a metal fence with ease, and helped himself to several beehives that the teachers were using for a school project, just a few meters from the classroom, at the blackness of night between 4:30am and 6:00am. This forced the school to erect an electric fence as well. “He’s not a teddy bear, but a dangerous predator,” said a 61 year old teacher. Ultimately, M13 was shot dead in February 2013 after following a 14 year old girl around a village.
| 10 | Bears in zoos |
Back in the 1940s, the soldier bear Wojtek was given honey and jam as a treat while serving in the Polish army. This honey provided him with energy for the Battle of Monte Cassino (1942) near Rome, where he helped to carry artillery shells to the front line.
These days, bears in zoos are still given honey as a treat, and the Orphaned Wildlife Centre in New York has numerous videos of its bear residents being fed honey. The park’s fans often send packs of honeycomb in as presents, and this video shows bear trainer Susan feeding 24 year old Leo using a spoon. Surprisingly, the bear doesn’t mind when the packet is empty, as though he understands the rules of the game perfectly. Susan does, however, give him the consolation prize of licking the container clean.
Another video shows trainer Jim feeding Jimbo honeycomb, with Leo’s head appearing from nowhere after about 15 seconds, for a quick lick of the container before vanishing again. 43 seconds in, Jimbo playfully grabs Jim’s leg, before Jim keeps up the honeycomb feeding session with one arm lodged inside the bear’s mouth.
Yet another video from the Centre set out to prove whether bears really do like honey. The 35 second mark shows two massive bear heads side by side, licking at the honey jar relentlessly. Outrageously though, they completely ignore the spoon that had been specially placed in the pot for them.
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