If you’re a person of a certain age who grew up with a television and a soul, then there’s a good chance the characters from Winnie the Pooh are near and dear to your heart.
Which also means that you’ve been aware for basically your whole life that bears really, really love honey.
Like Pooh, giant bears will go to great lengths to get to honey they’ve sniffed out – and even though the ensuing videos may be adorable to the masses, for to bee farmers…not so much.
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The bears can cause damage to hives that can cost thousands of dollars to repair, so most keepers work hard to keep them away. But when Ibrahim Sedef’s ideas of putting up metal cages and leaving out different bear-fare like bread and fruit didn’t work, he had a rather adorable lightbulb moment.
Maybe the bears could be brought on as quality control.
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He installed photo trap cameras that could track the bears roaming his farm, mostly at night, and then set up a table topped with labeled bowls of different kinds of honey.
It worked.
The bears didn’t disturb the hives, since the honey was ready and waiting, and now Sedef – and the rest of us – know which honey a true connoisseur would prefer.
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It turns out bears have expensive taste, because they devoured the Anzer honey first – it goes for around $150 a pound in Turkey – while leaving the cherry blossom honey untouched.
Now you know that the “good” honey really does taste much better – even the bears agree that you get what you pay for (even if they’re not technically paying).
