Elephants Fear of Bees May Save Their Lives

As elephant populations grow there have been more and more conflicts with the farming community. Farmers have been trampled and crops ruined. Farmers of course are fighting back and are killing the elephants despite bans against this.

Lucy King, a zoologist with the Nairobi, Kenya-based nonprofit Save the Elephants came up with a study idea to see if the sound of angry bees would make the elephants turn back.

The idea of scaring elephants with bees comes from earlier observations by King's colleagues Fritz Vollrath and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants. They determined in 2002 that elephants will avoid acacia trees with beehives.

The photo below from National Geographic shows some elephants who ran away from the sound of angry bees. This will enable farmers to strategically place hives or sound recordings to deter elephants from their land and provide some peace without killing the elephants that so many have worked so hard to protect and repopulate.