Bears Like Honey, Too

Monday evening, August 15th 

Tonight was supposed to be a quiet evening shared with my favorite husband and a lovely Malbec. Three hours and 3 beestings later we are instead drinking whiskey straight. 

Hive reassembled, fence fixed, diversion tactical bottles filled with nasty stuff and covered in peanut butter. Go bears.

This evening started with my husband going up to the garden to water, as usual, while I took the dogs for a walk. A few minutes down the road, I heard him hollering for me to come quick, as a bear had gotten into the bee hives in the garden. 

The hives are in the back corners, with tall flowers growing around them as shields. He knew something was wrong even before noticing the hive. The bees were louder than usual, emitting a distressed buzz. They were bumping into his head - letting him know something was very wrong. That was when he decided to look in the back corner. 

The fence poles are buried three feet into the ground, and a six foot tall fence wraps around them. The bear had pushed in the pole and was able to then bend the slack wire, digging underneath it. 

The top boxes full of honey were pushed off to the side - in the picture above, the bees are coating two of the honey supers. The bear had most wanted all the protein rich larvae from the brood chamber. In the photo above, you can see the larger brood frames scattered on the ground. A bear butt print is in the dirt, surrounded by thousands of dead bee bodies. When bees are defending the colony, they will embed their barbed stinger into the flesh of the intruder. As the bee pulls away, the barbed stinger is left in the attacker, still attached to the pulsating muscle of the bee, pumping the venom into the skin. As the bee pulls away, it is disemboweled, dying almost immediately after deploying the stinger. For this reason alone, bees rarely sting - only doing so when the action is worth losing their own life. 

After surveying the destruction, and calling the wildlife officer to report the bear, Joe and I set to work. Joe wore no protective gear while he worked within a foot of the hive to secure the fencing. He was not stung once, despite the tens of thousands of displaced and panicked bees in the immediate area.

I made my best effort to reassemble the hive. The brood nest was scraped nearly clean, and covered in dirt but a few live larvae and eggs remained. The nurse bees were still attending to these cells, even the midst of all the chaos - seeing this, I became overwhelmed with emotion and started to cry at the dedication and commitment of the colony. The queen was covered in dirt and honey, but still alive. I moved quickly in the gathering darkness, brushing off the dirt, righting the boxes, and slipping the frames back into place.

As I do not use foundation in the honey supers, some of the comb had collapsed under the weight of being upended, and also the bear had taken a large swipe of honeycomb. The now broken honey comb loosed over a gallon of honey into the hive, but I hoped the bees could recover most of it.

Despite tens of thousands of bees (freaked out, stressed bees) swarming around me as I struggled to put it all together, only three stung me, and those three were ones that I accidentally pinched: once when I lifted a super full of honey covered in hundreds of bees and rested it on my thigh, pinching a bee. The second when I stuck my knee against the fence to bend it back into place and squeezed a bee between my knee and fence. The third strike was when I crouched down and pinched a bee between my calf and thigh. I was covered in bees, thousands of bees, and were only stung by three that I pinched.

Best case scenario: They'll live for now, but they will not make it through winter, and it's too late in the season to try and combine them with another hive, I've had bad luck with late season joining hives. At the least the bear got a good meal.

Closing thoughts on that day: Joe is the best - he helped change my mindset. The bears are stressed and starving after two years of devastating fires in Gold Creek that destroyed their food sources. At least he got yummy meal of bee larvae and honey. Circle of life. I've never had a hive make it through the winter anyway, and it's easier to start over with new bees in a different spot than to move an existing hive. Already scoping out spots for next year, and making plans for a better fence. It's all good. I've made my peace with the bear, hope s/he makes it through hunting season.

Thursday, August 18th

The bees had coated the outside of the hive for three days, refusing to go inside. I thought there were one of two reasons:

1. It was extremely warm the last few days with temperatures in the high 90s. The bees could have been trying to cool off the hive. This is done by 'bearding' the outside of the hive and fanning the entrance with their wings to increase air circulation in the hive. 

2. It was very dirty in the hive, with dirt and loose honey everywhere, maybe they were giving the other bees room to clean. 

But on this morning I looked closer at the bottom of the hive and noticed that at the entrance was not live bees, as I had thought from a distance, but a mound of hundreds of dead bees blocking the entryway, covered by wasps that were feeding on the dead bees. The honey had flowed to the bottom of the hive and out the front entrance, attracting wasps. The bees had tried to protect the entryway, and as they fought with the wasps, had piled up, blocking the entrance. The bees were not coating the outside of the hive for the reasons I had initially thought. Quite the nightmarish contrary - they could not get back in. 

I switched out the top of the hive with a cover that had a top opening just big enough for one bee to enter at a time - all the easier to defend from wasps. 

I cleared away the mess at the bottom entrance and blocked it with a wedge of wood. 

I buried all the dead bees to discourage carrion feeding by the wasps, and set up wasp traps around the hive.

In the afternoon when I returned, the area had been visited once again by the bear, who had torn a hole in the fence and had dug underneath. This time, the bear had pushed over a pile of empty hive boxes and pulled away the wedge of wood at the bottom entrance of the restored hive. To solve the problem, I braced other blocks of wood against the entry, and wrapped the entire hive in fencing. After mending the hole in the fence, I hung up cheap water bottles filled with 50/50 water and bleach, and coated them in peanut butter - giving the bear a nasty taste if he came back, hopefully a diversion. Finally, I found large bales of wire throughout the property and piled them around both hives, making it difficult for anything to get close.

Final Thoughts, Friday, September 2nd

We have not had any problems in the last two weeks. It seems that if you just make it more difficult to get near the hive, i.e. pile lots of wire and lumber all around, the bear will lose interest. 

I usually do not have a problem. Normally the bears are up in higher elevations, but the fires in this drainage the last five years have depleted their once rich food supply. Bottom line, there are too many bears trying to pack on the calories in a limited area - the only food sources left in Gold Creek are where the houses are. 

Wildlife officials have been working on moving the bears to better foraging areas. Two were moved within the last few weeks, and they were skinny, starving little things. 

I am not a fan of electric fences. They do not always work, sometimes it just makes the bear madder and work harder, causing more destruction. With our dogs and kids of friends and family, an electric fence is just not worth the cost and effort. 

Our plan next year is to move the bee hives closer to the house and hang bells on the fencing, along with a motion detector light. The dogs will be alerted to any activity around the hive via both the bells and light and will chase off the bear.