Bees are being used in Africa to tackle elephant-human conflict — peacefully and safely

The Current21:57How bees are helping solve conflict between elephants and farmers in Africa

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As humans continue to expand into the wild, elephants in Africa are being forced into smaller and smaller spaces — and into conflict with people. So to solve this very large problem, some scientists are calling on the assistance of another, much smaller critter: bees.

"It turns out that elephants not only run away from bees, they won't touch trees with them," said Lucy King, head of Save the Elephants' human-elephant co-existence program.

"They will rumble to each other to warn each other that there are bees in the area and to stay away, which is a really fantastic discovery that we made," she told The Current's Matt Galloway.

Elephants being scared of bees is not a new finding — farmers in parts of Africa have long known that elephants wouldn't touch acacia trees with beehives in them, according to King.

But after King joined Save the Elephants in 2006, she spent more than 15 years investigating their claims "but with real science," she said. What they found was elephants weren't afraid of just one bee sting but getting swarmed with several stings to their watery parts, like their eyes and mouth.

WATCH: Lucy King researches elephants' fear of bees

"African bees have this phenomenal capability," she said. "As they sting, the release of pheromone triggers other bees in their colony to attack the same place."

"These elephants, of course, have phenomenal memories — that if they get stung even once in their life and they remember that pain, they won't forget. So they will avoid going back to an area where there are, you know, aggressive bees."

Armed with this knowledge, King and her colleagues have spent the better part of the past decade figuring out ways to use bees to deter elephants away from farmer fields and residential areas — peacefully and safely.

The result is several bee contraptions that King said have proven "really successful."

"What we're trying to do is keep them apart as safely as possible and enable the elephants just to continue on with their lives and allow people to live and sleep safely at night," she said. 

"So these natural, more holistic ways of keeping elephants apart are really important to do."

Beehives and buzz boxes

One of King's first designs was beehive fencing. It's comprised of "a series of interlinking beehives, one to the other, around the outside of a boundary, and then linked just with a piece of plain wire."

King said hives are hung between posts, around 10 to 20 metres around the outside of the farm. The fencing is also non-electrical, so there's no risk of the elephant getting electrocuted.

"If an elephant tries to push through into the farm, he actually will knock into the wire, which connects the hives," she said. "As they swing, they release the bees — and as we know from our experiments, the bees will scare the elephant away." 

King said the fencing has an 80 per cent success rate in keeping elephants out of farms, so they've been trying to deploy it around Africa and Asia. 

"[We're] getting very excited about the uptake and the fact that not only does it keep elephants out of farms, but it's helping farmers with honey production, better pollination for their crops and people are finding it a really enjoyable pastime as well," she said.

But the fencing isn't a perfect solution, especially in times of drought, according to King. 

"In Kenya, the last two and a half years, we've had an incredibly intensive drought … [and] we've lost a lot of our honeybees because of this severe drought," she said. "The less water there is, the less rain [there] is, less flower, [fewer] flowers is less nectar that the bees don't thrive."

To work around this, King and her colleagues have been working with another tool: bee buzz boxes, created by Wild Survivors in Tanzania, which emit the sounds of bees at high volumes.

"The elephants are still tricked into believing [there are] bees in the beehive fences," she said. "So that's been a really valuable tool to help us through this terrible drought."

Purity Milgo, a research officer with Save the Elephants, is also involved in this project. She said the box is about 15 by 10 centimetres in size, and uses an infrared sensor to trigger the sounds of bees.

"It causes the elephant to panic, and then it causes it to run away from farms, which I think works brilliantly and effectively," she told Galloway. "It works really, really fast."

WATCH: An elephant fleeing from a buzz box

She said they've trialled 16 boxes in four farms in Kenya and had successful results — with photographic evidence of elephants turning away from the farms.

"We actually tracked the footpath and you could see a U-turn," she said. "It basically looks like a U-turn around the farm, and they don't return."

King said the boxes go for around $100, and they're a "really fantastic adaptation."

"[It] might be appropriate for places where it's not ideal to have live bees … such as outside a school or a church or maybe a police compound," she said.

'Highly sentient animals'

King says she's always been captivated by elephants' "high levels of intelligence."

"[There's] this real sense that you are in the presence of a completely sentient animal who's absolutely aware of everything you're doing and saying," she said.

King recalls the difference in character between some elephants she's seen; some had humour and were cheeky, while others were strong or angry.

"There's a deep pleasure in getting to know their characters," she said. "I think this is why when we're trying to find solutions for people to live with them, we have to really be careful about the ethics.

"These are highly sentient animals, and we have to make sure that no deterrents that we develop are in any way painful for them, and we have to try and help communities live with them peacefully."

It's not an easy mission, especially as human development continues to encroach into nature and make elephants' living spaces smaller and smaller.

But King has faith in her mission — and young researchers like Milgo.

"When you hear of these conflicts and all these situations and instances of it … it's worrying and it's almost disheartening, you know," Milgo said. "But all in all, I think it's one of those things that it's important to do to study these creatures."

Produced by Enza Uda and Niza Lyapa Nondo.