Oh Pooh! Black bears bother beekeepers
It’s a dreaded sight for Traverse City beekeeper Larry Hilbert: Wood boxes containing beehives broken and scattered, the honeycomb stripped away, the bees dead or gone.
The culprits are honey-loving black bears. And the problem’s getting worse, said Hilbert, the owner of Hilbert’s Honey Bees.
“I’m a fourth-generation beekeeper; my sons are five,” he said. “I have more ( bear) problems in a month than my dad had in a 40-year career.”
Black bear populations are on the rise, particularly in the northern Lower Peninsula. The number of black bears 1 year old and older in that region has soared 29% since 2012 — up 47% since 2000 — to 2,112 bears, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Upper Peninsula adult black bear populations are up 11% in that time frame, to 9,699 bears.
Nowhere is the bear boom stronger than the 10-county area of western Michigan from the Leelanau Peninsula south to Muskegon County, designated by the DNR as the Baldwin Bear Management Unit, one of nine units in the U.P. and the northern Lower Peninsula.
The population growth is no accident. It’s a result of carefully restricted hunting and a desire by the DNR and hunters to bolster the bear numbers, in no small part to make for successful, enjoyable hunts for bear hunters that might have to wait 10 to 12 years to land a license in the Baldwin unit, through the state’s points-based, quasilottery draw. Some 2,845 hunters applied to hunt bear in the Baldwin unit last season. Just 80 got licenses.
There’s still plenty of habitat for more bears, said Tim Dusterwinkle, president of the Michigan Bear Hunters Association.
“We’d like to see more bears on the landscape,” he said. “We value the bear as the premier game animal in the state.”
But more bears has meant more nuisance problems: More trash receptacles trashed; more bird feeders becoming bear snacks.
A bear can wreak havoc in a cornfield, munching through crops. And then there’s the beekeepers, who raise and sell honey commercially and who provide pollination services for cherry and other fruit orchards. Bees are already a troubled species, and the bears don’t help.
And the more bears and humans get close to each other, the more potential danger arises.
People have a misconception that bears are only after honey, Hilbert said.
“The bear basically knocks the hive over and systematically destroys everything. There is no rebuilding the hive,” he said. “You not only lose the hive; you lose honey production for that year, too.
“He’ll eat the bees, the brood, the larvae. He eats everything but the wood.”