{"id":2053,"date":"2023-04-13T15:53:24","date_gmt":"2023-04-13T13:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/?p=2053"},"modified":"2023-08-02T18:43:34","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T16:43:34","slug":"not-every-bear-is-a-hive-breaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/2023\/not-every-bear-is-a-hive-breaker\/","title":{"rendered":"Not every bear is a hive-breaker"},"content":{"rendered":"

The popular belief is that any bear that smells honey cannot resist and breaks into the apiary. Scientists acting as police detectives have discovered that this is not true. Using DNA samples taken from ‘crime scenes’, the research team has shown that although there are repeat offenders, two-thirds of bears in the north-eastern Carpathians do not break into beehives, although many are still not properly secured.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>In early April 2014, in a small village surrounded by the Carpathian forest, 100 kilometres north-west of the Kremenaros tripoint where the borders of Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine meet, a beekeeper went to check his hives after the winter season. He had been running the apiary for more than three decades, and despite living in a region inhabited by brown bears, he had never suffered any damage from them. Nor had he ever properly protected his beehives against bears. Considering that bears cause on average 52 damages per year in a region of 4700 km2, most of them (92%) in apiaries, the beekeeper had been somewhat fortunate. Until that day. He found fifteen destroyed hives in his small apiary. A few days earlier, a very similar incident had occurred in another village just five kilometres away.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the case was reported to RDO\u015a, a team of researchers from the Institute of Nature Conservation of the Polish Academy of Sciences arrived at the site equipped with gloves, vials and a cool box. They were looking for biological material, mainly hairs, but also faeces left by bears presumably involved in the incidents. The researchers carefully inspected the damaged beehives, hive frames, fences and surrounding area in their search for evidence. Like police detectives, they secured all the biological samples and transported them to the laboratory in Krak\u00f3w. There they extracted DNA to identify the individuals responsible for destroying the beehives. They found that the same female with two cubs was involved in both apiary break-ins. Three years later, she was identified as being implicated in two similar incidents.<\/p>\n

Over four years, the team of researchers from IOP PAN and wildlife managers from the Regional Directorate for Environmental Protection in Rzesz\u00f3w inspected 209 damages reported as presumably caused by bears, and collected and analysed 146 biological samples. In parallel, the team conducted a year-long systematic genetic survey of the entire population, collecting hair and faecal samples across the bear’s range in the Podkarpackie Province. They then used complex statistical models to provide the first reliable estimate of the number of bears living in the Polish Eastern Carpathians. This has never been was never an easy task as these animals are elusive, rare and move long distances. But the team knew how to provoke the bears to rub against certain trees and leave their hairs there. Using special hair traps with a scent attractive to bears, they collected 169 hair samples.<\/p>\n

Using the genetic information contained in the collected hairs and faeces, the team estimated that between 45 and 115 bears inhabit the study area. “We found that out of an average of 72 bears living in the Polish Eastern Carpathians, just one-third break into apiaries,” states Teresa Berezowska-Cnota, lead author of the study. But what makes this finding even more exciting is that not all individuals were identified at damage sites equally frequently. “The common view is that if someone has behaved badly once, they will behave similarly badly in the future. We showed that this is rather the exception in the case of brown bears” she adds. Of the bears breaking into apiaries, about 33% were repeat offenders. Importantly, the results of the study suggest that most individuals did not cause any damage.<\/p>\n

The study has important implications for wildlife conservation and for the management of human-wildlife conflicts. Nuria Selva, the senior author of the study and project leader, believes that to effectively solve conflicts between humans and wild animals, we need to deal with both sides of the coin. \u201cOn the one side, there are humans. We still have a lot to do in terms of damage prevention. Most apiaries and livestock are not properly protected in areas inhabited or being recolonized by large carnivores, which leaves the door open for conflicts,” she explains. \u201cOn the other side is the wildlife. Without identifying the particular animals involved in conflicts and understanding their behaviour, conflicts cannot really be resolved\u201d. The authors point out that understanding the individual aspects of conflict behaviour through large spatiotemporal scales and population-wide studies should be a priority in applied ecology and conservation.<\/p>\n

The study has just been published in Journal of Applied Ecology. It was funded by the National Science Centre in Poland and is the result of a collaboration between the Institute of Nature Conservation of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Estaci\u00f3n Biol\u00f3gica de Do\u00f1ana CSIC, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, the Regional Directorate for Environmental Protection in Rzesz\u00f3w, and the Bieszczady and the Magura National Parks.<\/p>\n

Link to the paper: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/1365-2664.14388<\/a><\/p>\n

by Teresa Berezowska-Cnota<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The popular belief is that any bear that smells honey cannot resist and breaks into the apiary. Scientists acting as police detectives have discovered that this is not true. Using DNA samples taken from ‘crime scenes’, the research team has shown that although there are repeat offenders, two-thirds of bears in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2065,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2053"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2141,"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2053\/revisions\/2141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carpathianbear.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}