When life gives you bears… trick them into doing market research?
If I’m understanding a bad Google translation of this article (in Turkish) and an article (in English) that references the first article..
- İbrahim Sedef is an agricultural engineer and beekeeper in Trabzon province, in Turkey. However, the bears are raiding the beekeeper’s hives, not “honey production facilities” as the image states.
- Sedef has struggled with a number of bears raiding his hives, not only one bear; he is quoted as saying, “These big boys know their stuff, they prefer the expensive and quality honey. These big guys sure have good taste.” This, he refers to the bears in plural as “big boys” rather than naming one of them.
- The trials do not appear to be “double blind” but rather very loose experiments in which several types of honey are left out on a table, from the very expensive Anzer honey (valued at 1000 liras, or $171, per kilo) to a supermarket cherry jam (said to be used as a “control”) and several other honey samples.
- Despite varying the orders of the samples, the bears consistently prefer the expensive Anzer honey, said Sedef.
- The cameras were originally installed to find out how the bears were breaking in to steal honey from the hives, and incidentally were used to record these unofficial honey trials.
If anyone speaks Turkish and can clarify at all, I’d love to know more.. I definitely don’t speak any Turkish whatsoever.