I got an email from someone who noticed my cats in a few photos. They asked, “How well do your cats get along with your honey bees?” The short answer is, it’s not a problem.

We have two cats, a young cat and an older cat. The older cat, Nigel, is so completely laid back, it’s absurd. He doesn’t even notice the bees, and so far the bees haven’t taken much notice of him either.

The younger cat, Winston (seen in the photo), will chase after anything that flies. He approached the bees cautiously when he first saw them. Then he got bolder and sat in front of a hive entrance one day and tried to catch a few bees — and got stung in the face. He didn’t make any noise when he got stung, but ran away and tried rubbing the sting off with his paws. A couple minutes later he was back to normal and hasn’t tried to catch a bee since. He will notice bees crawling on the ground once in a while, but even then he’ll just sit there and look. Cats learn fast.

November 25th, 2010: Nigel eventually got stung in the face and freaked out. He didn’t know what to do or where to go. He ran in circles, didn’t watch where he was going and banged into the fence and eventually ran for the back door and I let him in the house. Now whenever he sees a bee, he runs away scared.

Our other cat, Winston, continues to keep a respectful distance from the bees. As seen in this photo, he gets very close to the hives at times, but seems totally at ease around them.

June 6th, 2014: A video of one of our other cats chillin’ with the bees.