Bears Keep Stealing Beekeeper’s Honey – He Turns Them into Quality Testers

Bears Keep Stealing Beekeeper’s Honey – He Turns Them into Quality Testers

Beekeeping

Beekeeping is an amazing enterprise that provides us with honey and helps promote a healthy, prosperous ecosystem. It involves a significant amount of work and care to maintain an apiary and harvest the honey from within. After all that work, it can be rather devastating for a beekeeper to find out that, that honey has been stolen. For one beekeeper in Trabzon, Turkey, this frustrating loss was a regular occurrence.

Honey Thieves

Ibrahim Sedef is an agricultural engineer that specializes in beekeeping. Unfortunately, the location of his apiary farm on the country’s Black Sea coast has a fair share of wild bears that happen to have quite a sweet tooth. Sedef would wake daily to find that his hives had been raided by the bears and he was quickly losing a significant amount of honey. In response, he began a slew of different attempts to keep the bears away. Sedef first began by installing cages to protect the hives, but the bears quickly found a way around them. He also left out other treats to try to lure the bears away from the honey. “I put outside several kinds of bread,” Sedef said. “For instance, there’s a kind of Trabzon-style brand bread prepared with whole wheat. It has always been their first choice among different breads. Their second choice is the sourdough bread, and their last choice is the bread bought from the market.” But no matter what breads Sedef tried, the bears always turned their attention back to his apiaries and that amazing liquid gold within. Eventually, Sedef changed his tactics on the situation all together – if he couldn’t stop them, might as well learn from them…

Professional Taste Testers

In his collection, Sedef has a variety of different honeys, some from different regions and created with different plants. With the bears being so persistent and clearly having such a keen sense of smell to hunt down the honey, Sedef decided to put the honeys to the test, by offering them freely to the bears. With a table, five bowls of honey, and a night vision camera, he set up a taste testing station for the bears. Unsurprisingly, the bears took to taste testing the honeys immediately, enjoying the rich sweets Sedef left out for them. Each evening, Sedef moved around the labeled bowls to see if the bears had consistent preferences and it was quickly clear that they did. While they ignored some honeys, like the cherry blossom honey, almost altogether, the rare Anzer honey from the Ballıköy region was the first honey that most bears dug into and its bowl was almost always licked clean by morning. This rare Turkish honey fetches a price of “1,000 liras per kilo,” (about $125 a pound), and is “among the most expensive honeys on the market.” Clearly the bears had good taste and their preferences validated the quality and high price of the special honey. Now, Sedef says he truly appreciates the bears and is thankful for their participation as honey taste testers. “When I watch the video,” Sedef laughed, “I forget all the damage they do. I love them.”

Citations

  Beekeeping – 5 Rookie Mistakes in This Video That You Can Learn From (2017) YouTube. 4 D Honeybee. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oMRFL1NGG8 (Accessed: 2020). Roberts, T. (2019) Family of bears kept stealing man’s honey so he turns them into taste testers, The Animal Rescue Site News. Available at: https://blog.theanimalrescuesite.greatergood.com/bears-taste-testers/ (Accessed: August 4, 2021). Sparks, H. (2019) Beekeeper turns honey-stealing bears into taste testers, New York Post. Available at: https://nypost.com/2019/08/29/beekeeper-turns-honey-stealing-bears-into-taste-testers/ (Accessed: August 4, 2021).