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Today on Animal Fact Files we’re talking about honey badgers. Thank you to Matthew Luke Asciak and Jaylin Landry for today’s request! Widely known on the internet as the animals with the least cares to give, honey badgers are fierce carnivores. These relatively small creatures aren’t much bigger than a cat, weighing in at an average of 22 pounds (10 kilograms) and measuring two feet (61 centimeters) in body length. Still, they’re formidable opponents to anything they come across and are often left alone while prowling their homes.

Honey badgers are found throughout Africa and southwest Asia. They may live in grasslands, savannahs, rocky hills, deserts, and mountainous regions. Honey badgers change their activity depending on the time of the year. In colder weather, they’re more active during the day; in warmer weather they’re more active at night. When they aren’t active, they spend their time in burrows either dug by themselves in the ground, in dead trees, or termite mounds or they’ll stay in the already-made burrows of aardvarks, porcupines, and hares. Honey badgers are the only surviving members of their genus, however they’re distantly related to ferrets and martens.

Honey badgers get their name from their habit of consuming honey - all while enduring the stings of hundreds of angry bees. This trait has lead people to believe that honey badgers are immune to bee stings, but in truth honey badgers are affected by these stinging arthropods. There have been occasions where honey badgers were trapped inside beehives and the relentless stings killed the honey badgers - though they can still take plenty of hits when they’re able to escape their buzzing pursuers. There’s also a story that honey badgers are lead to beehives by birds called “honeyguides”. This is a myth, as it’s never actually been observed in the wild.

Aside from honey and bee larvae, honey badgers eat a variety of other foods. These guys are the epitome of omnivores. They will eat anything. Small rodents make up a large portion of their diets, but they’ll also take lizards, insects, birds - including raptor chicks, young jackals and foxes, and even venomous snakes. Like some other members of their family, honey badgers seem to have a resistance to snake venom. This means they’re even able to take on snakes, such as puff adders, who might otherwise kill a lion.

Speaking of lions, these are some of the only honey badger predators. Others include leopards, cheetahs, and golden jackals, however, its seems important to note that these predators typically take young, defenseless honey badgers, or old, weak honey badgers - when faced with a honey badger in its prime, a predator may do better to seek food elsewhere.

Honey badgers are notoriously aggressive against attackers. They’ll release a foul smelling odor, similar to that of a skunk; they’ll also puffy up their bodies, raise their tails, roar, lunge, and bite at any opponent. To give an example of their tenacity, in one observation, it took an entire pride of six lions to take down a single honey badger - and even that took fifteen minutes! Aside from their less than sociable disposition, honey badgers have loose skin that makes them exceptionally difficult to keep a hold of.

Honey badgers are solitary animals except when mothers are raising young. Male honey badgers will compete over females, and a region's dominant male may have more than ten females with which to mate. Mating occurs in a den, and two months later a litter of one to two babies are born. For their first three months of life, honey badger babies stay in a den and are moved every three to eight days to a new den site. After three months, they’ll start venturing out with their mother. These babies will stay with their mother for at least a year - though males often stay up to two years. In the wild honey badgers live less than a decade.

For more facts on honey badgers, check out the links in the description. Give a thumbs up if you learned something new today, and thank you for watching Animal Fact Files.