Elephants.

There's less to write about on the beekeeping front at this time of year so I thought I'd post about a recently reported bee story - well, it was that or write another book review.

The problem with elephants, well one the problems with elephants, is that they need to eat. And on account of having very inefficient digestive systems they need to eat an awful lot, we're talking between 140 and 270 kg of food in a single day -it says so right there on wikipedia. The problem with people is they also need to eat, and whilst they don't each as much as elephants there's a lot more of them.

Over in sunny Africa this has caused numerous problems with elephants raiding farmland to eat crops. Not much irritates a farmer more than finding a three and a half ton migratory pachyderm and it's clan chomping away on his crops. It also isn't really that great for the elephants with them being chased off, pepper sprayed and sometimes shot. The stresses of these confrontations lead to stressed elephants and can result in displaced people. Of course this is just one of many problems caused by the overpopulation of humans all over the planet and their effect on the ecologies we live in but I don't imagine that anybody is about to cull our species,  return farmland to nature and limit our population growth so another solution is needed.

Enter stage right zoologist Dr Lucy King and her team of ..er.. other zoologists or whatever. They've developed a way to defend crops from elephants that doesn't involve human/elephant confrontations. Well done Lucy! It turns out that although honeybees can't sting though the skin of an elephant  they can deliver a nasty sting to the inside the animals trunk, unsurprisingly this means bees scare the bejesus out of elephants. So Lucy's team proposed using beehives to fence off farmland.

Great plan. Along comes Babar the bull elephant thinking to himself "I'm feeling a mite peckish, and I do believe there is a field full of ripe sugarcane just over yonder." He then saunters over to have a sweet feast. Normally he'd get to a fence, break through it and eat his fill. However, unknown to Babar this wire fence has a beehive dangling off it and his efforts to gain entry are seriously annoying it's residents. Out boils a horde of angry bees and Babar flees the scene leaving the field unscathed.

The award winning project was piloted on 17 farms in Kenya and succesfully turned away 31 out of 32 attemped elephant incursions. Now it's also being implemented in Tanzania and Uganda. Another benefit to the farmers is suddenly there's a lot of honey being produced which means more income for them which is an incentive to install the bees instead of more elephant guns. I assume it also makes their fences last longer now they don't have elephants flattening the things. I'm somewhat surprised this wasn't discovered and implemented locally as apiculture and elephants have both been in Africa for a long time. Perhaps the beekeepers and the farmers never thought to compare notes. But then I must admit I hadn't really given any thought myself as to why I've not seen any elephants in my own garden since the arrival of the bees either.