What do you find to be the best bear bait?

we used to bait up by Washkish (the north east side of Upper Red lake, great area btw!). Anyways we would always get meat scraps but more importantly was the doughnuts! Man they loved them! Also picked up grease for many different resteraunts, honey and mollasses about rounded it out. Every once in awhile we would have something funky, one year we had the nastiest batch of chicken I think ever procured by the chicken coup! Man the bears hit that bait FAAAAST! We'd take the suburben to the local (sometimes not so local) tastee stores and get the day old stuff..heck some of the places pulled fresh stuff off the shelves! We'd leave it all in chest freezers and in the wrappers till we got up north. Then a couple days before we'd start sorting what and how much would go out (not to mention we pulled the good stuff out before we left the twin cities<img src=icon_smile_big.gif border=0 align=middle> even then it made a tastee treat on the way up north with a bed FULL of sweets! Some of that grease got pretty nasty smelling also! great stuff and lots of fun....as for baitn in AK...well it STINKS unless ya have a boat LOL!

In the past five years we've run about 10
baits a year for 5 hunters per year. The worst year we've had was 4 out of five bears.
In the past we used all the bakery stuff but do not anymore. Meat scraps are not legal in WI as are a lot of other things mentioned above.
What we have found works great is taco chips or shells.
If you live in or near a major city they should not be hard to come by. Just find out who the local manufacturer is and talk to him about broke or soiled waste. We get them free. They have a long storage life, don't stink up the storage area and are easy to transport.
The bears can not get enough of them and they keep coming back for more.
Good luck on your hunt.

I see you live in Duluth. Take a ride south on on hy2 to near between Poplar and Brule. There is an artist who has a shop and display there on the west side of hy 2. Grizz Works. He does log carvings. The guy also hunts bear. Besides the fact that his art work is great to say the lease, his knowledge of bears is even better.
His name is Justin Howland and the place is in Maple. If you hunt, you'll love his work.

Edited by - logs on 01/12/2002 15:13:40

We've found that donuts and grease are the best. Hard to beat a honey burn, though!

We buy all the dayold stuff from a couple donut shop's. We also use a couple buckets of bacon grease, also from a couple restaurant's.
If you can ever find a fish & chip's place that is ready to change the grease, see if they are willing to part with it!