How Much Honey Would It Really Take for Winnie the Pooh to Get Stuck in a Rabbit Hole?

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Disney's Christopher Robin

If there’s one thing we know about everyone’s favorite Bear of Very Little Brain, Winnie the Pooh, it’s that homebear has a Hundred-Acre Ass. And how’d he get that junk in the bear trunk? Honey, honey.

In one of Pooh’s most celebrated exploits as a Bear of Considerable Rear, he binges hard on the good stuff while visiting Rabbit in his home and eats so much that he gets stuck trying to exit the rabbit hole. While he wriggles and fasts, Rabbit lives in his own personal hell, with his friend’s butt staring, ever unblinking, at him from the wall. He even tries turning it into art, but is foiled when a particularly violent sneeze ruins his ass-embled still-life. Eventually, Pooh gets unstuck, but is launched into the trunk of a hollow tree, where he finds more honey and lives out his gluttonous misadventure once again. As one does.

In celebration of Netflix’s recent addition of Disney’s Christopher Robin, a continuation of the classic Winnie the Pooh franchise that follows an adult Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor), we dug deep into the jar for a fact check: Could a bear really eat so much honey that they get stuck in a hole? Do bears even like honey? Would a bear even be interested in shoving any part of its girth into a rabbit hole?

We gave our favorite bearologist, Dr. Dave Garshelis, a bear research scientist at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and co-chair of the IUCN Bear Specialist Group, a call to find the answers to all these questions and more.

Garshelis’ animated bear bonafides measure up. He immediately drops knowledge that based on Pooh’s nationality (English) and the area’s bear population he must be a brown bear, and drops some knowledge about The Jungle Book‘s Baloo (he think he’s a sloth bear, but there’s been some controversy). He can be trusted.

First of all, yes, Pooh would be into honey, but he’d also be into, well, bees. Maybe even more into the bees than into the honey. “They’d be into honey in the hive,” Garshelis says. “They eat the young bees that are maturing. Like there’s a whole bunch of what they’re there for, the honey is to nurture the pupae, the larvae of the bees. The bears actually get as much out of that as from the honey, probably more, for the protein. It depends on the species of bear too, some bears are more into honey than others.”

And when a wild Pooh finds the honey, he’d binge like his life depended on it — because it kind of does.

“They will feast on it if it’s available. They’re programmed to eat as much as they can,” Garshelis says. Remember hibernation? This is how that magic can happen. “They just keep eating. They probably do have fullness cues but it’s at a much higher rate.” That bear is going to eat until the honey is gone, Pooh-style.

“Particularly in the fall they’re programmed to hyperphagia, which means over eating,” Garshelis continued. “They’re programmed to absolutely just eat constantly if they can find the food because they’re going to go into hibernation.”

However, honey doesn’t typically come in such large concentrations in the wild, so bears aren’t going to be going nuts on it like our friend Pooh. (It’s in a hive, not cute honey pots, if that was a concern.) And, important for our investigative purposes, bears just don’t bloat the way humans and anthropomorphized stuffed bears do.

“Over time they can get obese,” Garshelis says. “It’s not bloating like an ungulate bloats, it’s not gas. They can on an unlimited diet, in captivity for example, if you overfeed a bear they can get super obese, almost to the point where it looks like their stomach is going to drag on the ground, but not in one meal.”

Getting stuck in a rabbit hole would also be a no-go: “It wouldn’t just go into a hole,” he says. “It’s too tight.”

And that wouldn’t be the only reason Pooh wouldn’t be making a house call to Rabbit. “They eat rodents. Not really rabbits, though. Rabbits are probably too fast.” In the event that a bear does jam their face into a rabbit hole, they’d be able to rip it apart with their claws and escape.

The fateful tree-wedge that ends Pooh’s adventure is, according to Garshelis, impossible. Setting aside the physics of a bear flying like that simply from the force of a child pulling him (nope), he’d also be unlikely to find himself in the sticky situation of being stuck in a tree. “Stuck? Um, no, not really.”

Actually, when bears go inside hollow trees for a honey snack, it’s because they want to, not because they were thrown there. “It’s possible that a bear would stick its head inside of a hole in a hollow tree, but they’re not gonna stick their head inside something that’s too small to get their head out. They’ll just rip the tree.” Teeth or claws, doesn’t matter — either has more bite than bark.

If you do still want to believe in Pooh’s mythical flight, remember that Garshelis is an expert in IRL bears, not necessarily teddy bears: “I don’t think I had a teddy bear, I think I just had a monkey,” he says. Take from that what you will, and in the meantime, don’t go sticking your head into anything you can’t get it unstuck from.

Kase Wickman is a writer, editor, Ravenclaw and extremely amateur bear scientist in New Jersey. She prefers sock monkeys to teddy bears, and can be followed onTwitter and , if you dare.

Stream Disney's Christopher Robin on Netflix