Elephants are the largest living land mammals. An adult male African elephant can reach 14,000 pounds and tower 13 feet at its shoulder. The powerful pachyderms sometimes endanger people. Yet there’s something these giant beasts fear: attack by little African honeybees. Now a new study offers an application of that fear which benefits all creatures great and small.
Kenya’s population is growing. Expanding communities mean less land for elephants—and more human-elephant conflict. As elephants search for water and food, they sometimes enter human settlements. When that happens, the animals can destroy property and sometimes injure people.
Researchers want to help people and pachyderms live near each other peaceably.
Biologist Lucy King works for the charity Save the Elephants. She credits local Kenyan farmers for important intel on elephant behavior. They first told her how elephants actively avoid African bees and remember where the bees live.
King researched the farmers’ anecdotes. In a video on the website elephantsandbees.com, King shows how elephants react to even the sound of swarming bees. The animals flick their tails, wave their trunks, wag their heads, and kick up dust as they flee the area.
King notes that elephants don’t fear one sting. Instead, they’re afraid of repeated stinging from swarming bees. Despite their thick skin, the animals are vulnerable around their eyes, behind their ears, and inside their long trunks.
The elephants’ God-given fear of bee stings gives researchers like King a way to promote coexistence between humans and wildlife. She led a beehive fence study to deter elephants from farms.
The journal Conservation Science and Practice published research conducted by King and others from the University of Oxford and several wildlife organizations.
So-called beehive fences offer a novel way to keep elephants out of crops and away from people.
In Sagalla, Kenya, workers string large beehive boxes on wire between fenceposts. Every other hive is a fake hive. Elephants can see, smell, and hear the fence. If an elephant gets too close, the bees buzz.
King’s study involved 26 Kenyan farms using beehive fences. Over nine years, nearly 4,000 elephants approached these farms. On average, the fences prevented about 76% of elephants from raiding the farms. Under certain conditions, the fences worked even better.
To date, nearly 100 locations in Africa and Asia use bees to deter elephants.
Beehive fence keeps the behemoths away, saving farmers’ lives and livelihoods. But that’s not the only advantage: It also provides “free” crop pollination and generates money for the farmers from honey sales. That’s worth buzzing about.
Why? When God made the world, He created the beasts of the field and the creeping things alike. He knows their temperaments, their needs, and even how they would interact with each other and with people.
