Published on November 5, 2024 at 08:00. / Modified on November 5, 2024 at 08:04.
• Experiments confirm that installing beehives around crops helps repel elephants.
• This idea could lose effectiveness because bees are sensitive to changes in the climate.
• The rebound in elephant populations, real in Kenya and hoped for elsewhere in Africa, risks increasing confrontations between humans and the animal.
We imagine that their thick leather – 2 centimeters! – protects them from stings, but elephants have a holy horror of bees and we understand them: when they are angry, these creatures directly sting the moist membranes – near the eyes – or the trunk, whose mucous membranes are particularly sensitive. In addition, they deposit pheromones, molecules that lead other bees to choose the same targets. Enough to make them temporarily blind, while the edema fades.
In 2002, Fritz Vollrath (University of Oxford, Great Britain) and Iain Douglas-Hamilton (founder of the NGO Save the Elephants) collected the stories of honey hunters, who explained that elephants, very fond of honey leaves, acacia, avoid those carrying bees’ nests, just as they flee when these insects attack them. Stories that led young researcher Lucy King to devote her doctorate to the use of beehives as a repellent against elephants, under the direction of Fritz Vollrath and Iain Douglas-Hamilton.
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