– Why do we so often associate honey with bears?
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Bears like honey.
Several kinds of bears are famous for breaking into beehives to eat the honey. It’s a calorically dense food that bears are particularly well equipped to get at. Their thick, loose skin makes it possible to withstand a lot of bee stings.
Bears eat honey in the wild. They seem to be one of the only animal really tough enough to just straight up much down an angry bee hive. Then if it wasn’t a popular idea before, Winnie the Pooh story of his venture to the honey tree probably cemented it when it came out in 1926. In 1957 the Dutch Gold Honey Company introduced the bear shaped honey container to give their product a novelty uniqueness.
Sugar is calorie dense and rarer in nature than it is on your super market shelf, so when an animal comes upon some, it’s going to go for it. It’s why candy, snacks, and soda are so popular. The same goes for bears craving sugar, and they’re tough enough to take the brunt of an angry hive of bees. Honey is like 98% sugar, so it’s packed with calories for a bear to fill up on.
A bear needs a massive amount of calories to survive hibernation. One of the most calorie dense things that occur naturally is honey or fruits. If you were to give the bear a choice between eating an apple and eating a steak of the same size, they’d choose the apple first every time.
So bears in the wild will seek out sweet things like berries. If they find a hive in an old log or anywhere else that’s easy to reach they will tear into it with vigor. Their fur and thick skin make them hard to sting. The bees attempt to target their eyes or nose, but the bear is so driven that it will ignore the stings. In other words bears LOVE honey.
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