Mango Cottage Life

Homesteading in the city is different from homesteading in the country. But not in ways I’d expect it to be different.

In the country I expected wild animals to be my biggest problem.

In the city I expected wild people to be my biggest problem.

It’s turning out to be just the opposite.  In the country I had to deal with trespassers all the time, but never had to deal with wild animals — they were there: foxes, bobcats, raccoons, ‘possums, skunks, coyote, armadillos, even a panther… but they never caused any trouble and I never had to deal with any of them.

Here in the city I’ve had no problems with people.  But I have had to deal with rats, squirrels, cats and dogs, bizarre insects, raccoons killing my chickens, and now…. ready for this?  A BEAR!!!!

Never in a million  years, not in my wildest dreams would I have expected to see a bear, a BIG black bear in my backyard here in the middle of the Orlando metropolis, concrete in every direction for miles and miles, among many hundreds of thousands of people.

But there it was.  Raiding the beehive.  Poking around inside the fenced yard and outside the house for about 3 hours checking everything out.  Peeking in the back door.  Dragging a few things around.  Could tell how big it was by seeing how high it’s back came against objects it walked past… which turned out to be about waist high on me.  I’d say it was well over 300 pounds.

Black bears are usually shy of people, but this one didn’t seem to care one way or the other and pretty much ignored us, despite all our arm waving and shouting.  Just looked up at us, stuck out its tongue, licked the honey off its lips, and went back to what it was doing.

I could see some potential danger here — for us and the bear too.  Called 911 and to my utter amazement discovered that there is no one that responds to calls about a big black bear in your back yard in the middle of the metropolis.  We were on our own.  FL Fish and Wildlife said leave it alone and it will leave when it’s finished.  Told us the best deterrent is a 3 wire electrical fence around the hive (a few days later I received a packet from them with bear info, how to construct the electric fence, and a nifty black bear silhouette magnet with bear facts for the fridge.  A little late but I do like the magnet.)

It looked really really bad.  But when we checked the damage next morning there really was very little.  The hive was not broken, only knocked over, and the bear only ate 1 and 1/2 frames of the honey.  I set the hive back up and the bees went about their business like nothing had ever happened.  Two good things are that it gave me an opportunity to inspect the hive and motivated me to harvest the remaining honey.  Got about 3 gallons.  Not bad for a little backyard beehive.

Just in case the bear decided to come back, we built a fortress around our lone little hive — caged and electrified.  Either it’s working very well or the bear hasn’t come back.

The lesson?  Urban homesteading, city self-sufficiency, is an adventure… always expect the unexpected and be prepared — most of all, enjoy it.  And if you find a bear in your back yard, well, leave it alone and it’ll go home, waging its tail behind it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 at 10:32 am and is filed under Wildlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.