Howard,
If you do a search of past bear attacks in Bee-L - nearly 100% of bears will
return the following night once they start in on your hives.   Next time you
can use this information to lay in wait with prepared defense.

What to do then?  The bad news is once bears have identified your hives as
an eating location that spot is marked on their minds until they're dead
(natural or otherwise) so you always have to be cognizant that your hives
are at risk at that location while the bear is alive.

    -Electric fences - do work, but once the bear has a taste bears can
easily defeat the fence.  I have footage captured by the USDA during a study
with my beehives in '02 where the bears learned to jump the 4' electric
fences clean - destroy the hives - and jump out.  This was following a month
of equipment failures so the bears gradually learned to accept a little
voltage and noise with their appetite.  All 16 hives in the study were
utterly destroyed down to the last inch of beeswax within 6 weeks.  The
BEST-ABSOLUTE use of an electric fence is in prevention.  Maintain your
fences, check them for voltage at the fence using a measuring device.  Don't
leave anything to chance.

By your comment on electric fences I will surmise you live in a town that
has an ordinance against electric fencing eliminating this as a tool for
prevention for you. (??)
Towns usually pass ordinances such as these to keep people from harming
themselves or other people by electrocution.  Solar powered electric fences
can do little but zap the intruder for a few seconds since the source of
power is limited by the charge of the battery.  I would suggest appealing to
your council for an accepted variance on solar powered e-fences.  It's in
your town's interest to have a variety of weapons at their disposal to
eliminate nuisance bears without killing/trapping/chasing them - which was
the reason the USDA stepped in to the study mentioned above. They were
investigating the use of noise as abatement for bears.  If bears aren't into
 your beehives in that city/town then they're in someone's trash or worse,
in someone's kitchen.

The problem that your town and every community like it - big and small, is
that bears are learning to live with human encroachment.  Every year there
are more people,  more trashcans, more picnics, more food left in cars.
According to the USDA fellow running the study, bears learning to adapt to
cities are nearly twice (!) as big as their hill-running counter-parts.
They live much shorter lives but are twice as big from the bounty of food
available at every turn.  Which is why the number of bears killed on roads
is over 1000% higher than we saw in the 1980's (seem to recall numbers of
~5or6/year killed vs. 200+ in 2001).

Other options?
- noise abatement - "Critter Gitter" makes a squeal device activated by
motion.  The noise is piercing enough to persuade the bear to reel.  The
device also flashes light.  Together the device is fairly convincing to keep
bears off your hives.  The only problem with those devices is they commonly
sound at all hours of the day & night triggered by wind, squirrels - or for
no reason at all.  So you end up with angry neighbors, dead batteries and no
protection in a hurry - which is also the reason why we had such equipment
failures with the USDA study last summer.  Motion triggering devices simply
aren't perfected enough to keep batteries charged for the 'right' type of
(bear) abatement.

Knowing this - you could have placed a critter-gitter on site when the bear
first started in on your hive.  There's a 50-50 chance you could have
convinced this bear to leave for good.  I know for certain because I used
this EXACT method last summer when a bear tipped over my lone pollination
hive here at the house and took a few bites into the honey.  Knowing the
bear would be back the following night I assembled both a temporary solar
e-fence and the motion detector critter-gitter.  At 2am the next morning I
was awoke by the screams of the critter gitter.  Armed with a floodlight and
some yelling I chased the bear (AND cubs!) away at a very fast trot.  She
hasn't been back.

Hope you find some info that works for your situation.   Bears are smart.
They'll find a way to defeat your protection if left unattended.  You can at
least rely on bears to consistently apply everything in their power to get
to you hives once they have the taste of honey from your hives.  Know your
enemy and find whatever predictable behavior you can use to defeat their
advance!

Matthew Westall - Castle Rock, CO


----- Original Message -----
From: "Howard Kogan" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2003 5:55 PM
> aren't the bears hibernating by now?  Secondly, this is a situation where
I
> could not use an electric fence  does anyone have experience with another
> type of fence that works?
> Any thoughts will be much appreciated!  Howard

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