Elephants hate bees – here's why that's good news for Kenyan farmers

Farmers are turning bees into unexpected helpers to keep elephants off their crops.

Around the world, spreading farmland is increasingly overlapping with elephant habitats, often resulting in dangerous interactions as elephants roam over people's crops. But in Kenya, after decades of investigation, researchers have come up with a simple but ingenious solution to deter elephants: strings of beehive fences.

Inspired by longtime local knowledge of elephants' dislike of beehives, these buzzing barriers are offering a gentle but effective way of de-escalating the sometimes-violent interactions between farmers and elephants. And they are now spreading across the world, from Mozambique to Thailand.

So what is it about bees that elephants hate so much? And can they really be expected to keep the peace in this ever more crowded world?

Human-elephant conflict is a growing issue in several areas. In Kenya, where the population and demand for resources is growing, human-inhabited areas are increasingly overlapping with elephant's ranges. Combined with the recovery of some elephant populations, this is leading to greater chance of conflict between humans and these giants.

"Expansion of agricultural land, logging, urbanisation, and shrinking and fragmentation of elephant habitats – wildlife that require large spaces of land – [are] forcing elephants to enter human settlements in search of food and water," says Greta Francesca Iori, an Ethiopia-based advisor on elephant conservation and human-elephant conflict for several governments and non-profits.

"Wherever there are elephants, there are instances and information coming through of human-elephant conflict."

Graeme Shannon, a wildlife ecologist at Bangor University in Wales, UK, who has studied African elephants for two decades, notes that the people pushed into these areas are often of poorer backgrounds. "So farming is crucial for them and their families."

But water and lush, highly nutritional crops can be very appealing for elephants, leading them close to human settlements.

People take a lot of time caring for their land, then the elephants come "when you have planted the crops and they are almost mature", says Emmanuel Mwamba, a farmer who lives in Mwakoma, Kenya, a village at the frontline of human-elephant conflict. "If elephants come there… everything is gone."

"Some of us […] rely on crops for subsistence", adds Mwamba. "Imagine if that was destroyed within a night."

Such encounters can be fatal for both sides. Farmers can die trying to stop hungry, seven-tonne elephants from entering their crops, while the elephants can end up getting killed by humans for happening upon a good meal.

To prevent these conflicts, scientists and locals have spent decades testing a variety of solutions to deter elephants, from electric fences, watchtowers and solar spotlights to chilli-greased bricks and smelly elephant repellents, or even simply using noises to scare the elephants – all with their own pros and cons.

But using bees to scare away elephants has emerged as a particularly promising and efficient tool, combining effective deterrence with a host of other benefits for farmers.

It all started back in the early 2000s, when Fritz Vollrath, an ecologist at the University of Oxford and chairman of charity Save the Elephants, and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save The Elephants, heard a folklore story from Kenyan pastoralists about how trees in certain areas were not damaged by elephants because they had beehives in them.

Inspired by the tale, Vollrath and Douglas-Hamilton began working with Lucy King, co-existence director at Save the Elephants, to investigate scientifically whether bees could really scare the giant pachyderms. By 2007 their research had led them to conclude that elephants not only stay away from trees containing beehives of wild African honeybees, but "also rumble to each other to tell each other to stay away", King says. "We know that they can get stung, and we know that they never forget."

King designed a tool farmers could use to protect their crops from hungry elephants: a fence made of beehives. She first tested the idea in 2008 in a community in Laikipia, Kenya, which suffered from regular elephant crop-raids.

The fence goes all around a farm, with hives placed every 10m (33ft) between two posts. Lured in with natural attractants such as beeswax and lemongrass oil, African honeybees naturally colonise the beehives.

"For one acre [0.4 hectares] of farmland, you need 24 beehives," King says. However, just 12 of these are real: every other one is a dummy beehive – a fake made of just a yellow piece of plywood that gives the elephants the illusion that there are more beehives than there really are. This reduces costs and gives more space to the bees. "As an elephant approaches in the dark, and they can smell bees, and they can smell honey, they can see a load of yellow boxes. They don't know which one is real and which one is fake. So it's an illusion. And it seems to work," King says.

Other than deterring elephants from the crops and so providing food security, the beehive fences can bring other benefits to the communities who use them.

For one thing, they can generate an additional income for the farmers by producing honey. "If a farmer has honey and has crops, it's actually good enough for the family to go on," says Mwamba, who lives in one of the villages where the beehive fences have been tested and has now become a beehive fence project officer for Save the Elephants, teaching other farmers how to build and maintain the fences.

Women are "often disproportionately impacted by human elephant conflict", adds King: it's often women who work in the farms and need to scare the elephants away, risking injury. For them, "feeling more empowered in their situations means that they can actually get on with the job of looking after their household, maybe going back to school, maybe making sure they have time to do the other things", King says.

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Over the years, King and other researchers have collected a body of evidence about the efficiency of beehive fences in Kenya, and today the fences are being tried and studied in dozens of other countries including Tanzania, Mozambique and Sri Lanka. Proof of the method's efficiency also comes from Thailand, another country where human-elephant conflict is an everyday issue.

In 2024, King and her colleagues published a long-term study that analysed the effectiveness of beehive fences over nine years in two small villages in southern Kenya: Mwambiti and Mwakoma, where Emmanuel Mwamba lives. These communities are highly reliant on crops, such as cabbage and maize, that attract the many elephants that cross between the East and West side of Tsavo National Park, which hosts around 15,000 elephants – the largest population in Kenya.

The researchers worked in close contact with locals, installing and collecting data on the beehive fences. Out of almost 4,000 elephants which approached the beehive fences, 75% of them were deterred by the fences, the study found. The farmers also made $2250 (£1,740) from selling honey.

"I think it's ingenious," says Shannon, who wasn't involved in the research. "You've got this natural mechanism by which you can deter these animals from approaching farms. I just think it's brilliant."

Still, the study also revealed some of the weaknesses of the tool, Shannon adds. For example, the bee populations plummeted during drought years due to a lack of flowering plants. In 2018, when the hives were still recovering from the previous year's drought, an unusually large number of elephants entered the villages, and the fences managed to deter only around 73%. "Like any single method or any single tool, it has caveats and limitations to how effective it can be," says Shannon.

King says she also worries about the impact of climate change on beehive fences, "because if you have these erratic droughts happening every four years, rather than every 15-20 years like they used to happen, you're in trouble because the bees don't recover in time". Excessive rain can also be a problem for the bees, she adds, as it can knock flowers down from trees and bushes.

A solution, the researchers suggest, is implementing other tools which can work together with the beehive fences, such as chilli briquettes or watchtowers. "Without question, there is no one solution," says King.

But thinking on a larger scale, says Iori, while such local solutions can be helpful in mitigating human-elephant conflict, they can be put at risk by both climatic and geopolitical shocks, which in turn can "significantly reduce people's belief" in them. "We need to have always a multi-pronged approach, where you're also dealing with higher level issues of: How do we engage government? How do we create belief? How do we reduce the pressure, both on elephants and people, at a systemic level… which is often to do with a lot more complex things," she says.

For now, though, the beehive fences are helping Mwamba's and other communities. "We started with two beehive fences. Now we have 700 hives covering three villages," says Mwamba. "It's a good thing for the community right now." Nowadays, he adds, people believe they need to co-exist with elephants.

Before the introduction of beehive fences, "the elephants had crop-raided most of the farms here," Mwamba recalls. "Right now, people can easily live without fear."

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