An Elephant's Fear of Bees May Help Save Them and Local Farmers
An Elephant's Fear of Bees May Help Save Them and Local Farmers
Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine
July 24, 2024
See link
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/elephants-fear-of-bees-may-help-save-them-and-local-farmers
for photo.
We like the idea that elephants are scared of mice because it’s comically
endearing to imagine a 7-ton behemoth cowering before a furball the size of
its toenail. Unfortunately the cartoons lied — it isn’t true. But there’s
another creature, even smaller, that really does strike fear into the
hearts of pachyderms everywhere: the humble honey bee.
Since the turn of the century, study after study has detailed how the
sight, sound, and even smell of bees has the power to repel elephants. In
an era of rising conflict between the world’s largest land animals and
their human neighbors — elephants are notorious crop raiders throughout
sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia — this research has pointed the way to
a more harmonious relationship. It offers new possibilities for deterrence,
protecting the livelihoods of poor farmers and the lives of the “problem
animals” themselves, who are often killed for their offenses.
Lucy King, project director at the conservation non-profit Save the
Elephants, and prominent elephant researcher described the problem in a
2019 TED talk. “We’re dealing with people who are living on the very edge
of poverty,” she says. “They don’t have big budgets. How do you resolve
this issue?”
How We Know Elephants are Scared of Bees
A new answer to that question began to emerge in the early 2000s when
Oxford researchers Fritz Vollrath and Iain Douglas-Hamilton — now the
chairman and CEO, respectively, of Save the Elephants — learned from
pastoralists in northern Kenya that elephants refused to feed from trees
with active hives.
If true, this bit of bush wisdom suggested a more natural alternative to
the electric fences commonly used (with varying degrees of success) to
deter elephants. In light of alarming population declines — “we’re losing
these animals by the day and, in some countries, by the hour,” as King put
it — the need for such an alternative was painfully apparent.
Vollrath, Douglas-Hamilton, and King, who was then a Ph.D. student,
designed an experiment to test the locals’ claim. They recorded the ominous
sound of a swarming hive, then played it through wireless speakers hidden
in trees above elephant families. In a video from the study, the animals
grow visibly anxious, perking their ears and glancing from side to side,
alert for danger. Suddenly, one of them bolts; within seconds, the rest
follow, fleeing to safety.
This was exactly the response the trio had hoped for. The next question was
how to transform their insight into a practical means of easing the fraught
human-elephant dynamic, and King soon found a solution: fences filled with
bees. But first it’s worth pausing to examine why this strategy works at
all, especially since elephants routinely fend off all manner of fearsome
predators.
Wild Elephants are Vulnerable to Bee Stings
Most of an elephant’s body is covered in tough, leathery skin, about 2
centimeters (less than an inch) thick. But a few sensitive areas — around
the eyes and ears, up the trunk — remain exposed. And according to Mark
Wright, a University of Hawaii professor who studies pest management (the
pests being elephants, in this case), bees target those vulnerabilities
mercilessly. “I’ve been attacked by an angry swarm, and they go straight
for the face,” he says, laughing. “It’s incredible.”
For the unfortunate elephant, this battle is even worse than Goliath versus
David; it’s Goliath versus a thousand Davids. Every time a bee stings, it
releases an alarm pheromone, calling its fellow defenders to pile on the
pain en masse. The effect is “excruciating” and long-lived, Wright says — a
trauma no elephant will soon forget.
It’s unclear how elephants come by this fear. It could be an innate,
evolved response, or it could be learned through experience and social
cues. Some observations favor the latter explanation. Captive elephants,
who are usually shielded from bees and may never have felt their wrath,
tend not to avoid them as strictly as wild ones, who either have firsthand
knowledge or were taught by their elders to steer clear.
In Wright’s experiments, the uninitiated seem to lack proper respect. But
once they realize what the bees are capable of, “they’re quickly schooled,”
Wright says. “They recognize it as a serious threat, but only if they’ve
experienced it as a living horror.”
Beehive Fences as Natural Deterrents
Having discovered the elephant equivalent of kryptonite, King built a
barrier out of it. The exact design varies, but generally, these fences
consist of small beehive boxes spaced a few meters apart and connected by
wire. If an elephant tampers with any part of the system, they’re likely to
meet with swift aggression as the disturbance ripples across the hives.
An early trial of the beehive fence in a Turkana community in northern
Kenya showed promise: Whenever an elephant approached within a few feet, it
would back away or parallel the fence until it could walk around. Of 32
farm invasions over two years, only one involved an elephant breaking
through the hives; the rest occurred at points in the perimeter that were
lined instead with thorn bushes.
King and other researchers have since run dozens of tests across two
continents, from Mozambique to South Africa to Thailand, with similar
success. They’ve continued fine-tuning, searching for the ideal balance of
deterrence and affordability. For example, a 2018 study in Gabon revealed
that more hive activity is better — busy bees make for edgy elephants — but
not every box necessarily needs to be occupied.
Though farmers have plenty of techniques for guarding their crops (dogs,
drums, firecrackers), beehives have the added benefit of a valuable
byproduct. By selling the honey, farmers can eventually recoup construction
costs, an essential point for winning community buy-in. As an international
team of researchers wrote in 2019, “Offsetting economic losses is
considered essential to managing human-elephant conflict successfully.”
The Role of Bee Pheromones in Repelling Elephants
As it turns out, it’s not just the sound of honey bees that drives
elephants away — their scent does the trick just as well. Elephants have a
superb sense of smell, with more genes tied to olfactory reception than
perhaps any other animal (2,000 to dogs’ 900 or so). Over the past few
years, Wright has been investigating how to take advantage of this fact.
In a 2018 paper, he and his colleagues showed that elephants are repelled
by the blend of organic molecules in the alarm pheromone bees emit during
attacks. He partnered with ISCA Technologies, a California-based biotech
firm, to produce a simplified, synthetic version of the pheromone, which
they dubbed SPLAT. The pasty substance comes in a large tube that looks
like it was made for a caulk gun and can be spread around to discourage
probing elephants.
For now, Wright says, it’s “seriously experimental,” and he sees SPLAT as
complementing rather than replacing the hive strategy. But when combined,
the two could make effective deterrence even more viable for low-income
communities.
The idea is to condition elephants to fear the pheromone by setting up
actual hives and letting them endure a few assaults. Once they’ve learned
to associate that scent with agonizing stings, the hives can be replaced
with — cheaper, logistically simpler — synthetic pheromones. This strategy
requires fewer colonies since one batch can be moved around a region to
condition new elephants (or to reinforce the lesson in those that get
complacent over time).
There’s one more bonus: Elephants certainly don’t like SPLAT, but unlike
with flesh-and-blood bees, they don’t run screaming away from it. Instead,
they back off casually — which, all things considered, is probably for the
best: “You don't want 1,000 tons of elephant crashing across the
landscape,” Wright says.