Using The Bear's Strongest Sense As An Advantage!

A bear's strongest sense is its smell. They can pick up a scent from a mile away! This will help you when placing your bait. As a reputed online hunting store in Lloydminster, we believe we should help you understand how you can use a bear’s strength as your strength. 

In this blog, we will touch on things you can add to your bait barrel to attract more bears, letting the bears work for you, and of course, all of this is going to increase the number of bears that will be using your bait. 

Building Your Bait Barrel 

To first bring in the bears, you will need to use meat. This includes but is not limited to beef, pork, or even wild game. The best meat you can use is beaver; bears love beaver! If you have read our blog, The Bear Necessities For Bear Archery, you already know there’s an advantage to having beavers in your water source to help naturally lure bears into your bait. 

The first time setting out your barrel, use 70% meat to get the bears most interested. After your bait has been out for a bit and you’ve checked your trail cameras, it's time to build the bait for the rest of the season. 

When building bear bait, use things that will smell good to a bear in your bait, such as sugar syrups like caramel or chocolate, buttery popcorn, icing, candies, bacon grease, and oats, and still include raw meat. This is going to continue to attract bears to your bait as well as bring in more bears. Some people will add fruit into their mix, assuming it will bring in more bears. However, we have found bears have an insanely huge sweet tooth!

Tip: if you use syrups and sticky foods in your baits, they will stick to the bear's paws, getting the bear to track the bait through the forest and giving you a bigger radius of scent travel to attract more bears into your baits. Make the bears work for you. 

When going hunting or replenishing your bear bait, don’t forget to bring your Bear Bomb to help add some sweet smells such as cake icing or during the rut use sow n estrus. Bear guides have found that The Bear Bomb has the ability to activate bait sites in minutes to be hit, giving you more action hitting your baits. Disperse Bear Bomb Cake Icing in short bursts from a stand or blind, or lock down the valve and empty the contents of the can all at once to unleash a potent cloud of scent that can travel in excess of a quarter mile on a three mph breeze.

Don’t Forget To Control Your Scent!

Every time you are going out to your bait, make sure your personal scent is as minimal as possible. Use odorless laundry soap on your hunting clothing, do not apply perfume or cologne before going out to the baits. This includes hair products as well. Wash your hair and body with Dead Down Wind Scent hair and body wash to eliminate the odors you bring to the bait. 

Before entering your bait, make sure to properly spray yourself down with Scent-A-Way. With bears, we prefer odorless because you will want to utilize the natural scent of trees and bait. Tip: one place most people forget to spray is the inside of their hat. It is crucial to spray here because your forehead will most likely smell, and your hat will absorb it. 

Bears also have highly developed noses that contain hundreds of tiny muscles and let them manipulate them with the same dexterity as people’s fingers. The surface area inside their 9-inch noses also has hundreds of times more surface area and receptors than a human’s. 

Bears have an incredible sense of smell as the area of their brain that manages the sense of smell, called the olfactory bulb, is at least five times larger than the same area in human brains, even though a bear’s brain is one-third the size.

Watch for our next blog post, and Don’t forget to live on the WILDSIDE with Wildside Outdoors. 

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