The honey badger is a relatively small animal averaging about 25 pounds, with large males occasionally reaching 35 pounds. They are long-bodied with short, powerful legs, standing about 12 inches at the shoulder.
Honey badgers are solitary animals that spend a lot of time actively, noisily, patrolling large territories, searching for almost anything edible. They are mostly carnivorous hunters but will try various foods, including fruits and even some flower species. They scavenge for carrion and actively hunt and eat a large variety of prey, including birds, reptiles, and even young monkeys, but are especially fond of honey. They will seek out and attack honey bee hives with incredible determination, accepting hundreds of stings. At the same time, they eat honey, honeycomb and their favourite, the bee larvae, located at the center of the hive.
Honey badgers are not only able to accept stings from bees but can also handle bites from the world's deadliest snakes, like puff adders, mambas and cobras, which they happily hunt, kill and devour. The honey badger is not necessarily immune to these venoms, but rather the badger's skin is so thick and tough that most bee stingers and snake fangs cannot penetrate it. If the venom of a giant snake does get into the system, the badger may be killed but often has a coma-like "downtime" while it recovers. This may be a few moments or as long as several hours, after which the badger will awake and promptly finishes off its snake dinner.- Amazing!
The honey badger has a high metabolism and spends lots of energy crashing around its territory, looking for things to consume. There is very little stealth involved here. They risk alerting prey but also risk aggravating predators such as lions, leopards and hyenas, all of which are considerably larger than the 20 to 35-pound honey badger, and they don't seem to care. They can, occasionally, be killed by these animals, but these predators don't usually take the risk involved in subduing animals as formidable as the honey badger.