AZA Professional Members |
  The Elephants and Bees Project:
Check out our conservation work in Northern Kenya where bees are helping to save elephants and people!
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 When elephants and humans reside in the same areas, they often come into conflict, and crop-raiding is a particularly big problem. Elephants are herbivores, so local communities' crop fields are like an enormous salad buffet. When these massive pachyderms start raiding crops, local farmers are forced to defend their livelihoods, which can result in life-threatening conflicts.
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 In Northern Kenya, the local Turkana people in the Ngare Mara community tend livestock and grow crops in a major elephant corridor that leads to the protected Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves. In this area, crop-raiding elephants are common and conflict often occurs. So, researchers at Disney's Animal Kingdom teamed up with Drs. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Fritz Vollrath and Lucy King from Save the Elephants (www.savetheelephants.org) to examine ways of deterring crop-raiding elephants. Their creative solution is something to "buzz" about!
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Elephants Make Bee Alarm Calls
Most people have heard the myth that elephants are afraid of mice, but in talking to local communities, Save the Elephants’ conservationists learned that elephants are REALLY afraid of bees! They discovered that when elephants chose trees to rest under, they avoided the ones with beehives. (To learn more about this project, visit: http://www.elephantsandbees.com/Lucy_King/Welcome.html). |
To test this, researchers with Disney's Animal Kingdom and Save the Elephants conducted "play-back experiements" to see how elephants would react to and communicate about bees.
First, researchers found elephants resting in the shade beneath trees. Then, they hid a speaker nearby to play sound recordings of angry bees. Several microphones were also placed around the elephants to record their vocal responses to the bee sounds. Upon hearing the sounds of bees, elephants would shake their heads, flee the area and make all sorts of low frequency “rumble” vocalizations that signal “Danger!” |
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But this left scientists wondering: can elephants really communicate to other elephants that bees are near, even if bees are not present? The answer was yes! Researchers played the recordings of bee alarm rumbles to other elephant families, who responded by shaking their heads and running away as if bees were present. |
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Beehive Fences Protect Crops
Armed with this new knowledge, Save the Elephants' conservationists came up with a creative solution to stop crop-raiding elephants in the community of Ngare Mara. Here, they worked with the Turkana farmers to build “beehive fences” around their fields. The fences are made of artificial beehives connected together by a strong wire. These hives are then colonized by wild bees. When elephants run into the hives or the connecting wire, it shakes the hives and disturbs the bees. Hearing the bee sounds, and occasionally getting stung, has kept the elephants away.
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 Now, not only are farmers’ crops safe from elephants, but the farmers can also harvest the “elephant-friendly” honey! These beehive fences are providing both a way for Turkana farmers to protect their crops and an additional source of income. Thanks to the Elephants and Bees project, bees are not only pollinating plants, they are also playing a vital role in helping to protect elephants and people in Kenya!
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To learn more about Elephant Communication please visit the links below: |
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To learn more about Save the Elephants, visit: 
