Scott Lindsay talks Bear

If you live in Maine and haven’t seen a bear around your hive…… you will. Prophetic warning, nope, just more common sense advise from Kenny. Kenny doesn’t just make this stuff up you know, and he isn’t talking all the time either, as witnessed in this photo. Kenny has a love for nature as most all of us do. If you made it to the March meeting, you too were paying close attention to Scott Lindsay and his straight forward talk concerning bears.  Scott covered a fairly broad spectrum of topics on bear behavior as well as some of his first hand experiences with bears. Mostly, he talked about the bears behavior and interaction with beekeepers and their apiary. I learned a few new ways to build that electric fence that I keep putting off. I don’t think I will build that ground cover version that seems so effective and I can imagine falling upon it myself while it is charged. I do like the “ground wire as every other wire” set up. Sounds perfect for a larger animal that touches multiple wires and it ensures a strong ground connection. There were some hand-outs and some fence plans that I will be adding to this post. I liked Scott’s honest talk on bears. When it comes to interactions between bear and man, he did not come down hard on either side, as we seem to be programmed to pick sides these days. His ideas on handling bears sounded reasonable, coming down on the side of good common sense and positive outcomes. An important “take away” I got from this meeting was that when it is between a bear and your hives, the “it” better be a strong electrified fence.