![\"Rows](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/hives-electric-fence-snow.jpg\")
\u0160OP SR has also filmed the job. A documentary made by Michaela Skuban, an \u0160OP SR zoologist and large carnivore expert, shows how to install an electric fence against bears and protect bees, the agency said in 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brown bears damaged 130 beehives in 37 raids in Slovakia’s Liptov and Lower Orava regions between 2020 and 2024, according to a new study of district damage files. In roughly two of every three cases, the hives already had an electric fence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The study covers the districts of Ru\u017eomberok, Doln\u00fd Kub\u00edn and Liptovsk\u00fd Mikul\u00e1\u0161 in northwestern Slovakia. Jakub Kla\u010dko, a student at Matej Bel University in Bansk\u00e1 Bystrica, used Slovakia’s freedom of information law to get the files and then interviewed district officials. His co-author, Peter Urban, is a professor in its Department of Biology and Environmental Studies, and once worked as a zoologist at the State Nature Conservancy of the Slovak Republic, \u0160OP SR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Damage peaked in 2023, with 15 events, or 40 percent of the total, and most raids came in spring and summer. June had 12 events, and April and July had 6 each, the months when colonies are full of brood, or larvae, and then of honey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ru\u017eomberok district had 30 of the 37 events. In 2023 it counted 3,545 colonies and 315 beekeepers, and bears damaged 1.38 percent of those colonies. Liptovsk\u00fd Mikul\u00e1\u0161, with roughly twice as many colonies, logged 5 events in five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most damage, 22 events or 59 percent, happened in rural areas outside villages, and it came back to the same places “despite the use of preventive measures, particularly electric fencing,” the authors write. A site called Do Dielca, near the Ru\u017eomberok town cemetery, appears seven times in the tables, with 46 colonies, and every case there that was paid out lists an electric fence. Its hives were hit in 2021, in 2022, three times in 2023 and again in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In June 2023, the country’s brown bear intervention team found several synanthropic bears, animals used to living near people, at that cemetery, drawn by pork and beef tallow added to the candle wax. Light, sound, alarm shots and pyrotechnics failed, and the bears “showed no signs of shyness when encountering humans,” the team wrote. It trapped a male about 5 years old, roughly 220 pounds (100 kilograms), and a vet put it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Up the valley in Liptovsk\u00e9 Rev\u00face, \u0160OP SR said in October 2023 that a four-year-old male had destroyed bee colonies and damaged electric fences. A local hunting association shot it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The authors still recommend electric fences, combined with ordinary fencing, but stress that a fence only works if it is built correctly and has a strong enough energizer, the box that sends the pulses. Slovakia’s brown bear care program asks for at least four wires, the lowest about 4 to 10 inches (10 to 25 centimeters) off the ground and the highest at least 55 inches (140 centimeters) up, with at least 7 joules per pulse. The intervention team’s prevention page<\/a> adds at least 6,000 volts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u0160OP SR has also filmed the job. A documentary made by Michaela Skuban, an \u0160OP SR zoologist and large carnivore expert, shows how to install an electric fence against bears and protect bees, the agency said in 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n