![]() In some cases, though, hives full of aggressive African honey bees are not ideal. “Finding a natural threat to scare elephants in the most holistic way possible, without terrifying them or making them go into pain, is really useful for management,” she said. King led in 2017 revealed that beehive fences had an 80 percent success rate in keeping elephants off farms. When elephants disturb the fence, the hives swing and the bees swarm. King has been studying elephants’ fear of bees since 2006 and applied what she learned to create specialized wire fences upon which beehives hang like pendulums. That knowledge was first translated into Western scientific observation in 2002, when Maasai honey hunters in Kenya mentioned to researchers that elephants never damaged trees that contain beehives.ĭr. San rock art from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, suggests ancient human awareness of elephants’ fear of bees, Dr. “Human-elephant conflict feeds into the issue of local people being recruited into poaching gangs,” said Francesca Mahoney, founder and director of Wild Survivors, a nonprofit based in England that developed the BuzzBox.īees are an increasingly popular means of trying to quell that conflict. This breeds fear, anger and intolerance for the animals, eroding community support for their conservation and sometimes leading to retaliation. “Elephants are getting more and more compressed into smaller spaces,” said Lucy King, head of the human-elephant coexistence program at Save the Elephants, which is helping to deploy the BuzzBox.Įlephants can take an entire year’s harvest overnight and occasionally even kill people they encounter. As human populations grow, people are encroaching on formerly wild areas, including some game reserves and national parks. Vogt said.Ĭonflict between humans and elephants is an urgent problem across Africa. “We have reports from farmers saying, ‘Oh yeah, it’s really working,’ but now this video is really evidence of that,” Dr. Video footage of the incident is the first proof of concept that the boxes are an effective deterrent for critically endangered forest elephants, said Tina Vogt, technical director of Elephant Research and Conservation, a German nonprofit group that is testing the devices in Liberia.
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