TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — 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 culprit, as cliché as it may be, 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 told the Detroit Free Press (http://on.freep.com/2tAmBcr ). “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 percent since 2012 — up 47 percent since 2000 — to 2,112 bears, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Upper Peninsula adult black bear populations are up 11 percent 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.
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