Bear caught with hand in the honey jar in northern Greece
A bear conservation group has released camera footage showing an adult bear raiding a bee farm on Mount Paiko in northern Greece and is advising beekeepers to keep a radio playing near their hives.
Captured by the Kallisto bear conservation group earlier this month as it responded to complaints by local bee farmers in the area of Goumenissa, the footage shows an adult bear destroying up 15-20 hives and eating around 40 kilograms of honey.
“It was last year’s honey, which the producers had put in there to feed the bees. They haven’t had a yield yet this year as flowering has been limited. The bear also ate the larvae,” Kallisto’s head of communications, Giorgos Theodoridis, told the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (AMNA) on Tuesday.
“We have advised producers to move their hives into electrified fencing and to leave a radio playing so that the noise will scare off the animals,” he said.
Theodoridis added that this was the first bear sighting in the area in almost a decade, saying that experts believe bears are also being drawn by an abundance of chestnuts.
“A lot of chestnuts are still on the trees because producers were not getting a good price for them, so they left them there. This means there’s an abundance of food [for bears] on the branches and on the ground,” Theodoridis told the AMNA.
