Farmers use bees to scare elephants off their land

Jacob Musyoki is a Form Two student at Kambu Secondary School near Mtito Andei, Makueni County. His bare homestead reflects the harsh lifestyle his parents, Stephen and Juliana Musyoki have been living for the last 30 years.

As the eldest son in the family of five children, Jacob knows too well that the future of the family rests squarely on his shoulders. When we visited his family’s home two weeks ago, Jacob sat on a wooden stool outside the mud walled hovel that bore little semblance to a modern home.

As his exuberant mother happily welcomed us to their home in Kyusiani village, the young man was deep in thought.

Their home lies only 300 metres from Tsavo East National Park and as far back as the family can remember, they have not had a decent harvest of maize, millet, sorghum and green grams from their five-acre piece of land due to marauding elephants from Tsavo.

“Our cries to Kenya Wildlife Service have seen no fruits since all we were told is that a lasting solution will be found. Thirty years is a long time to be looking for a solution,” says the senior Musyoki.

But the family — and others nearby — has devised ingenious ways of keeping elephants to their side of the wild and this has to do with the bee.

Apparently, the elephant will run for miles when confronted by a single bee. And villagers have adopted beehives along their fences as a solution to the decades long human-wildlife conflict.

The idea came from the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust who, with support from British Airways, assisted the villagers put up beehives along their farmland borders. Doing this has effectively put an end to endless conflicts that villagers used to have with the jumbos.

“We have had a serious problem with elephants,” Jacob tells me. “You should have come here before we erected the bee hives along the edge of our garden. Those tiny seedlings you see would be gone by now.”

The conflict has, however, not just been limited to the damage these animals cause on plants, Jacob shows us scars inflicted upon him in his flight from elephants.

One of his feet is swollen from the effects of a big kei apple thorn that is still lodged therein. He was running away from an elephant when he stumbled and fell. He was nonetheless happy to escape with his life.

The incident happened at night in an area where electricity is yet to be connected. Prior to the incident, Jacob and his parents had tried to throw stones at the animals to no avail, they had also thrown flames of fire and these had also not kept the animals away.

A few kilometers from the Musyoki’s lies the home of John Kalamba. His family has lived in Ivyaani village for more than 20 years.

Ivyaani is named after a huge rock formation that is a few hundred meters away. Expecting a good harvest in the already rocky, dry landscape is challenging enough without including the menace of marauding elephants looking for a quick meal.

Here, we are met by a group of women, who are also using live bee fences to manage the elephant invasion.

“Tulipanda mahindi pamoja na maembe kwa ile shamba. Zote zililiwa na ndovu. Lakini sasa wataonana na hawa nyuki,” (We planted maize and mangoes over there. The entire crop was destroyed by elephants. They will now have to face off with these bees) Angelica Munyao told us.

But, how exactly does this bee strategy work?

According to Neville Sheldrick, grandson of the Sheldricks who have been involved in wildlife conservation in Kenya for years, elephants loathe the small insects that are known for their killer stings.

“Beehives are strategically suspended along a fence which skirts the boundary of an agricultural plot. When an elephant tries to enter the plot, they disturb the fence, the bees become agitated and since elephants are averse to the buzzing sound they keep off,” he says.

According to Sheldrick, bees are known to sting the soft tissues of the elephant’s trunk which irritates these animals. This strategy has been tried in a number of farms around Tsavo Conservation Area with good success. The beehive idea was initiated by Lucy King, a zoologist who played back a recording of buzzing bees to a herd of elephants. Most fled within seconds. The hives and the posts holding them are painted with distinctive yellow markings so that elephants can quickly associate the fence with bees and choose to avoid them altogether.

This learning by elephants has an added benefit to cost efficiency for the beehive fence, since not every hive needs to be active.

A percentage of the hives put along the fences are just dummies without any functionality but elephants will not dare come near them just to prove whether or not they harbour bees.

The project was started almost a year ago and seems to have a 100 per cent success as villagers say elephants no longer come into their farms.

Apart from keeping the jumbos away, the bee fences have also provided farmers with another source of income — honey.

“We were dependent on produce harvested from our farms which we would sell but now, having these bees here has seen us harvest honey that become another stream of revenue to our suppressed economy,” says Salome Kyengo.