Bear raids bee farm in norther Greece, eats 40 kg of honey (pictures)

A bear raided a bee farm on Mount Paiko, northern Greece, destroyed 15 to 20 hives and ate around 40 kilos of honey. It is the first appearance of a bear in the area in the almost a decade.

The adult honey-thief was captured on a video footage released by Kallisto, a wild life conservation group.

Kallisto installed the security camera after bee farmers in the area of Goumenissa on Mount Paiko complained.

“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.

The thief’s footprints

“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.

He 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 AMNA.

It is not clear whether the bear ate the 40 kg of honey in one raid or over several nights/days.