Canis lupus hominis

Source.

Everyone grew up watching cartoons in which elephants were shown to run away in absolute terror at the sight of a mouse.

It made for some good television, but it was hardly accuracy. As I do recall, The Simpsons parodied this old convention by having an elephant eat a live mouse– which is about as accurate as the elephant shrieking in fear at the sight of a rodent.

However, there is a small creature that elephants do fear.

As you saw from that clip, African savanna elephants will avoid the sound of buzzing bees. I have heard of these elephants knocking down trees to eat the leaves, and I have heard of them digging down to the water table in the desert in order to get a good drink and a mud bath.

But I have never heard of them raiding bee hives for honey.

We all know that African honey bees are very aggressive when aroused. In the Americas, introduced African bees have hybrid with European domestic honey bees and have spread throughout Latin American to the Southwestern United States and Floriuda. These are the “killer bees,” which do kill people every year.  When I was a kid,  the killer bee had not yet arrived in the US, but we were told that they were coming and soon would take over the whole of the United States. Of course, it was later determined that they couldn’t live in any place that had a real winter, so their range will forever be confined to the milder parts of California, the Desert Southwest, most of Texas, the Subtropical South, and Florida.

But such aggressive bee-havior, must have some effect upon the elephants. Even with their thick hides, the aggressive stinging swarms must be too much for them.

One of the real problems facing elephants in Africa is that human population continues to expand, and these humans are forced to settle in regions that are within core conservation areas for a wide variety of wildlife. Elephants are known for their opportunistic foraging habits– and their heightened levels of aggression toward people who disturb them. So elephants and poor farmers are not natural friends. Elephants kill many people every year, and they eat a lot of crops– not a trivial issue when so many people in Africa are going hungry.

So last year, it was proposed that African villages use the elephants’ fear of bees to solve this problem. High-voltage electric fences will keep elephants out of settled areas, but it is not a practical solution at all. Many regions in Africa have poor access to electricity, and setting up and maintaining the fences is quite costly. However, setting up “bee fences” is far more practical.

So the first experimental bee fences were put up this year.  Bee hives were established along the perimeter of cultivated fields at 17 farms in Kenya that had long suffered elephant raids.  Within the test area, the elephants stopped 97 percent of their attempted crop raids when they heard the bees buzzing.

This is truly an amazing discovery, and what’s more, the bees themselves will produce honey that the farmers can use for themselves or sell at profit. An electric fence does nothing but expend resources, but a bee fence could generate its own revenue. They also are useful in pollinating crops, and they can be set up in virtually any part of Africa where elephants occur.

Lucy King, a researcher at Oxford University, has been the main force behind these studies, which underscore the need for practical solutions to real conservation problems.

It is one thing for those of us in the West to rock back on our heels and whine about how the various African governments won’t do anything to save their wildlife. Such whining makes certain Westerners feel good about themselves, I guess.

But if we are actually to come up with real solutions to these problems, the human development part of the problem must be considered.

Westerners can say all they want about saving the elephants, but no one in the West will ever have most of their food and income taken by elephants. No one in the West is ever going to face an elephant attack or bury a loved one who has died at the hands of a pachyderm.

We can say all we want.

But unless we think about the needs of the people who actually live there, we will never be able to save the elephants.

Do you think any government can turn a blind eye to an animal that is that much of a threat to small farmers just to placate the demands of relatively wealthy Westerners?

Lucy King is putting her conservation values in action. She is trying to find real solutions to these problems.

And it will take many more people like her throughout the conservation movement to really make a difference for endangered and threatened species.

We have to be concerned about people if we are to save wildlife.

We ignore this element at our own peril.