Key Facts:
A UNSW researcher found using bees to scare elephants away from crops in Botswana raised more questions than answers.
In Botswana, coexisting with the country's 130,000 elephants can be a daily negotiation. For rural families, tending a crop means hoping these 'gentle giants' don't wander through and cause damage while searching for food or water.
For conservationists, it means seeking solutions that protect both livelihoods and wildlife. A new study steps into the heart of that challenge.
"Living with such a large animal and such a large population can be really tricky," says lead author Dr Tempe Adams, a UNSW Sydney researcher who lives in Botswana and studies human-elephant conflict.
"For farmers here, it's not unusual to wake up and find an elephant in your yard," she says.
"Trying to help people live with elephants, conflict-free, is a big focus of my work."
Botswana is home to the world's largest population of elephants. Dr Adams develops and tests ways to prevent them from raiding crops and damaging property.
The approach used in the study was trialled with success in Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania and Gabon involved an unlikely ally: bees. In these countries, elephants instinctively avoided beehive fences – a barrier made of live African honeybee beehives strung together between posts. Elephants avoided these fences most likely because of their own painful encounters with bee swarms.
Before investing in the same technology in Botswana, Dr Adams wanted to know whether it would work.
"We're a very dry area. We have the Kalahari sandy soil. Every elephant range has different environmental factors," she says. "It was really important to test the concept first."
Rather than building fences, Dr Adams began with a simpler, cheaper experiment: playing recorded bee sounds to wild elephants and observing their reactions.
The idea was to see if the animals would instinctively retreat from the sound.
An unremarkable outcome
The results were mixed. Some elephants fled immediately. Others barely moved when they heard the bees.
"The data showed more elephants responded to bee sounds with a medium or strong reaction compared to elephants that responded to white noise," Dr Adams says.
The study showed 53.3% of family units reacted within the resting area compared to 26.6% in the control trials. Four family units moved more than 20 metres away during the bee playbacks, while only one did so in control trials.
"That in and of itself is an amazing result," she says.
"In science, we're so trained to only publish what's significant. But it's really important to try and understand the complexity of the mixed results from behavioural studies when dealing with highly individual sentient animals like elephants."
She says in this case, not every elephant in Botswana will have experienced bees. But those who had learned to run away.
"That's intriguing. It shows that using bees as a deterrent could be context or geographically specific – so it's not a method that would work everywhere.
"It tells us we need to look deeper."
So why did Botswana's elephants react differently from those in countries where bee-based deterrents work?
The answer may lie not with the elephants, but with the bees. Botswana's bee populations are scarce.
"The easiest test is to open a jar of honey and see how long it takes for a bee to arrive," Dr Adams says.
"Here, sometimes that can take days or weeks."
Low bee numbers likely mean fewer elephants have had painful encounters with swarms, so have less reason to fear them.
The reasons for the scarcity are complex: dry conditions, a short flowering season, limited agriculture – and vast stretches of land without water.
Small farms, big stakes
In northern Botswana, most farmers are subsistence growers cultivating one to three hectares. They often use traditional farming methods, ploughing fields with donkeys or cattle.
"This kind of farming is for their families and their livelihoods," says Dr Adams.
"It's not mass scale production farming. We don't really have much of that in Botswana because we're so dry."
Crops are planted once a year after the rains and harvested in the dry season. But it's then, as food is ripening, that the full waterholes draw elephants close to villages – and then, conflict peaks.
Elephants moving along traditional wildlife corridors to reach rivers may stumble upon maize, sorghum or millet fields, and help themselves.
"It's very opportunistic behaviour," says Dr Adams. "They're coming for the water, but a ripening crop along the way is a tasty snack."
Even a small raid can be devastating for rural families who rely on a single harvest to feed themselves.
Beyond the test
The bee-sound study was conducted in Chobe National Park during peak dry season, targeting elephants resting on the ground. This setting could help ensure their reactions were pure.
"We ideally wanted elephants that were sleeping on the ground, so they were oblivious, as much as possible, to anything around them."
Dr Adams hopes to replicate the test in other parts of Botswana, especially near the country's few commercial farms, to see if local conditions change the response.
But she's just as interested in shifting focus to the bees themselves.
"Working out what's happening with our bee status might be more impactful than doing further elephant behavioural studies," she says.
"Is it climate change related? Is it disease related? How can we increase our bee population here?"
Collaboration, she says, is key. The study was published in Pachyderm, which is a specialist journal for elephant and rhino conservation. It was supported by Elephants Without Borders and co-authored by Dr Lucy King from Save the Elephants, who pioneered the beehive fence concept.
In a previous study, in the same area, Dr Adams trialled barriers of solar-powered strobe lights that each flashed a different colour across crop fields. This gave a disco-like experience, which deterred elephants. Farmers reported less damage by elephants to their crops.
Meanwhile, conservationists in Sri Lanka – which has the world's highest rate of human-elephant conflict – were trialling the same concept, but without knowledge of the work already being done in Botswana.
"We want our results to land with the people actually on the ground working on conflict," Dr Adams says. "And a vital part of this is publishing all results – whether significant or not."
She says the bee experiment was never a failure but instead, serves as an important check.
"It really shows the power and importance of trialling these things before investing money in them," she says. "It opens more questions, more discussions, more collaborations.
"That's how we move toward real conservation solutions."
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