Bees save crop farmers from elephants

A herd of elephants in a farm in Burgret, Nanyuki. File | Nation

What you need to know:

  • One of the beneficiaries, Hezron Nzumu, a farmer in Sagalla, Taita Taveta in the environs of the Tsavo Game Reserve recounts of sleepless nights watching over his crop against elephants’ incursions.
  • This was before 2012 when Nzumu and other farmers adopted the elephant deterring bee-hive booby-trapped fencing around the borderlines of their farms.

The herd of elephants raise their ears after hearing the sound of buzzing bees. Fearing danger, they scamper in the opposite direction.

This incidence recorded in a documentary as part of research findings is guiding the implementation of a conservation programme in parts of the country where elephant habitats and agricultural land overlap, to ensure co-existence.

The story of conflict between farmers and elephants as they compete for limited land and water is not new in Kenya. But thanks to this innovation, farmers are putting this interesting fact about the beast being scared stiff of bees to good use through a programme dubbed Elephants and Bees.

One of the beneficiaries, Hezron Nzumu, a farmer in Sagalla, Taita Taveta in the environs of the Tsavo Game Reserve recounts of sleepless nights watching over his crop against elephants’ incursions.

“We used to stay awake most nights in the hope that we will hear elephants approaching our farms, especially when crops have matured,” he recounts.

“Once we heard them, we would beat drums, light firecrackers around the edges of the shambas, and use whistles to scare away the elephants. It was so much work.”

Despite this, says the farmer with a six-acre piece of land, they often lost entire crops to the ravenous beasts. “I think the animals can smell mature crops from afar. They particularly love maize, but they will uproot even cassava and ravage an entire green pea or green grams gardens,” he says.

This was before 2012 when Nzumu and other farmers adopted the elephant deterring bee-hive booby-trapped fencing around the borderlines of their farms.

The fence consists of hives interlinked with trip wires every 30 feet, so that if an elephant attempts to go through any of the wires, then beehives all along the fence swing and release the stinging insects, which in turn attack and chase them away. The beehives are suspended on wires between posts with a flat thatched roof above to protect the bees from the sun.

The initiative by Dr Lucy King, which started as a trial for her PhD work, has become a trailblazer. She is the leader of the Elephants and Bees Project having started research on the concept in 2007 in Samburu and Laikipia, both of which have game reserves.

With support from the University of Oxford in the UK, the charity Save the Elephants, the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund and the Kenya Wildlife Services, she has been able to complete studies on how to use honey bees (Apismelliferascutellata) to prevent elephants breaching farmland boundaries.

The farm-based trials were conducted in two small Turkana farming communities that are within the elephants’ range. The communities are located 2km apart, within the greater Ngare Mara Community, Meru North.

Elephants here migrate between Shaba, Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves and Meru National Park to the south.

Her involvement was steered by research done earlier proclaiming that elephants avoid feeding on acacia trees with beehives. “This was followed by behavioural experiments demonstrating that not only do elephants run from bee sounds, but they also have an alarm that alerts family members to retreat from a possible bee threat,” she says.

According to research findings, upon monitoring elephant raids over three crop seasons, it was discovered that 97 per cent of raids were aborted if the field was protected by a fence containing a beehive every 10 metres.

She says that a pilot study she led involving 34 farms on the edge of two farming communities in northern Kenya found beehive fences to be an effective elephant deterrent compared to traditional thorn bush barriers.

Dr Lucy says in the study which was published in 2011 in the African Journal of Ecology that elephants made 14 attempts to enter farmland and 13 of these were unsuccessful. In each case, the elephants were forced to turn away from the area after confronting a beehive fence or walk the length of the fence to choose an easier entry point through a thorn bush.

Only once did elephants break through a beehive fence to eat crops, according to the paper.

It is this that is informing the progressive roll out of the measure. She has rolled it out in the coastal region with additive financial support from individuals with more being built in five African countries, including neighbouring Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana and Mozambique.

“In Samburu and Laikipia, 18 farms have benefitted from the project and now we have 12 in Tsavo,” she says of the strategy, which not only keeps the destructive animals off the farms but is also complementing farmers’ livelihoods through apiculture.

Dr Lucy says the concept is an attractive one. Not only do farmers benet from reduced crop-raiding but such beehives offer an additional income through the sale of honey and wax products.

Nzumu, who has 12 hives, harvests at least 10 litres of honey from each hive in four months. Every one kilogramme unprocessed honey is bought back by the project at Sh200.

Dr Lucy notes that, in Kenya, electrification projects often fail because of poor maintenance, spiralling costs and the lack of buying capacity among the communities where the elephants are common.