Did you know that elephants hate bees?
Around the world, spreading farmland is increasingly overlapping with elephant habitats, often resulting in dangerous interactions, as elephants roam over people’s crops.
Human-elephant conflict is a growing issue in several areas. In Kenya, where the population, and demand for resources, is growing, human-inhabited areas are increasingly overlapping with elephant’s ranges. Combined with the recovery of some elephant populations, this is leading to greater chance of conflict between humans and these giants.
“Expansion of agricultural land, logging, urbanisation, and shrinking and fragmentation of elephant habitats, are forcing elephants to enter human settlements in search of food and water,” says Greta Francesca Iori, an Ethiopia-based advisor on elephant conservation and human-elephant conflict for several governments and non-profits.
Graeme Shannon, a wildlife ecologist at Bangor University in Wales, U.K., who has studied African elephants for two decades, notes that the people pushed into these areas are often of poorer backgrounds. “So farming is crucial for them and their families.” But water and lush, highly nutritional, crops can be very appealing for elephants, attracting them close human settlements.
People take a lot of time caring for their land, then the elephants come “when you have planted the crops and they are almost mature”, says Emmanuel Mwamba, a farmer who lives in Mwakoma, Kenya, a village at the frontline of human-elephant conflict. “If elephants come there… everything is gone.”
Such encounters can also be fatal for both sides. Farmers can die trying to stop hungry, seven-ton elephants from entering their crops, while the elephants can end up getting killed by humans for happening upon a good meal.
To prevent these conflicts, scientists and locals have spent decades testing a variety of solutions to deter elephants; they’ve tried electric fences, watchtowers, solar spotlights, chili-greased bricks, and smelly elephant repellents, or even simply using noises to scare the elephants – each method having their own pros and cons. But using bees to scare away elephants has emerged as a particularly promising and efficient tool, combining effective deterrence with a host of other benefits for farmers.
It all started back in the early 2000s, when Fritz Vollrath, an ecologist at the University of Oxford, and chairman of the charity Save the Elephants, and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save The Elephants, heard a folklore story from Kenyan pastoralists about how trees in certain areas were not damaged by elephants because they had beehives in them.
Inspired by the tale, Vollrath and Douglas-Hamilton began working with Lucy King, co-existence director at Save the Elephants, to investigate scientifically whether bees could really scare the giant pachyderms. By 2007 their research had led them to conclude that elephants not only stay away from trees containing beehives of wild African honeybees, but “also rumble to each other to tell each other to stay away“, King says. “We know that they can get stung, and we know that they never forget.” Hence, elephants hate bees.
King designed a tool farmers could use to protect their crops from hungry elephants: a fence made of beehives. She first tested the idea in 2008 in a community in Laikipia, Kenya, which suffered from regular elephant crop-raids. The fence goes all around a farm, with hives placed every 10m (33ft) between two posts. Lured in with natural attractants such as beeswax and lemongrass oil, African honeybees naturally colonise the beehives. “For one acre of farmland, you need 24 beehives,” King says. However, just 12 of these are real: every other one is a dummy beehive – a fake made of just a yellow piece of plywood that gives the elephants the illusion that there are more beehives than there really are. This reduces costs and gives more space to the bees.
Other than deterring elephants from the crops and so providing food security, the beehive fences can bring other benefits to the communities who use them. For one thing, they can generate an additional income for the farmers by producing honey. “If a farmer has honey and crops, it’s actually good enough to support the family,” says Mwamba, who lives in one of the villages where the beehive fences have been tested: Mwamba has now become a beehive fence project officer for Save the Elephants, teaching other farmers how to build and maintain the fences.
Today the fences are being tried and studied in dozens of other countries including, Mozambique and Sri Lanka. Proof of the method’s efficiency also comes from Thailand, another country where human-elephant conflict is an everyday issue.
Again, who would have thought?
