We like the idea that elephants are scared of mice because it’s comically endearing to imagine a 7-ton behemoth cowering before a furball the size of its toenail. Unfortunately the cartoons lied — it isn’t true. But there’s another creature, even smaller, that really does strike fear into the hearts of pachyderms everywhere: the humble honey bee.
Since the turn of the century, study after study has detailed how the sight, sound, and even smell of bees has the power to repel elephants. In an era of rising conflict between the world’s largest land animals and their human neighbors — elephants are notorious crop raiders throughout sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia — this research has pointed the way to a more harmonious relationship. It offers new possibilities for deterrence, protecting the livelihoods of poor farmers and the lives of the “problem animals” themselves, who are often killed for their offenses.
Lucy King, project director at the conservation non-profit Save the Elephants, and prominent elephant researcher described the problem in a 2019 TED talk. “We’re dealing with people who are living on the very edge of poverty,” she says. “They don’t have big budgets. How do you resolve this issue?”
How We Know Elephants are Scared of Bees
A new answer to that question began to emerge in the early 2000s when Oxford researchers Fritz Vollrath and Iain Douglas-Hamilton — now the chairman and CEO, respectively, of Save the Elephants — learned from pastoralists in northern Kenya that elephants refused to feed from trees with active hives.
If true, this bit of bush wisdom suggested a more natural alternative to the electric fences commonly used (with varying degrees of success) to deter elephants. In light of alarming population declines — “we’re losing these animals by the day and, in some countries, by the hour,” as King put it — the need for such an alternative was painfully apparent.
Vollrath, Douglas-Hamilton, and King, who was then a Ph.D. student, designed an experiment to test the locals’ claim. They recorded the ominous sound of a swarming hive, then played it through wireless speakers hidden in trees above elephant families. In a video from the study, the animals grow visibly anxious, perking their ears and glancing from side to side, alert for danger. Suddenly, one of them bolts; within seconds, the rest follow, fleeing to safety.
This was exactly the response the trio had hoped for. The next question was how to transform their insight into a practical means of easing the fraught human-elephant dynamic, and King soon found a solution: fences filled with bees. But first it’s worth pausing to examine why this strategy works at all, especially since elephants routinely fend off all manner of fearsome predators.
Read More: How Many Elephants Are Left In The World?
Wild Elephants are Vulnerable to Bee Stings
Most of an elephant’s body is covered in tough, leathery skin, about 2 centimeters (less than an inch) thick. But a few sensitive areas — around the eyes and ears, up the trunk — remain exposed. And according to Mark Wright, a University of Hawaii professor who studies pest management (the pests being elephants, in this case), bees target those vulnerabilities mercilessly. “I’ve been attacked by an angry swarm, and they go straight for the face,” he says, laughing. “It’s incredible.”
For the unfortunate elephant, this battle is even worse than Goliath versus David; it’s Goliath versus a thousand Davids. Every time a bee stings, it releases an alarm pheromone, calling its fellow defenders to pile on the pain en masse. The effect is “excruciating” and long-lived, Wright says — a trauma no elephant will soon forget.
It’s unclear how elephants come by this fear. It could be an innate, evolved response, or it could be learned through experience and social cues. Some observations favor the latter explanation. Captive elephants, who are usually shielded from bees and may never have felt their wrath, tend not to avoid them as strictly as wild ones, who either have firsthand knowledge or were taught by their elders to steer clear.
In Wright’s experiments, the uninitiated seem to lack proper respect. But once they realize what the bees are capable of, “they’re quickly schooled,” Wright says. “They recognize it as a serious threat, but only if they’ve experienced it as a living horror.”
Read More: Can Elephants Learn By Observing and Imitating Others?
Beehive Fences as Natural Deterrents
Having discovered the elephant equivalent of kryptonite, King built a barrier out of it. The exact design varies, but generally, these fences consist of small beehive boxes spaced a few meters apart and connected by wire. If an elephant tampers with any part of the system, they’re likely to meet with swift aggression as the disturbance ripples across the hives.
An early trial of the beehive fence in a Turkana community in northern Kenya showed promise: Whenever an elephant approached within a few feet, it would back away or parallel the fence until it could walk around. Of 32 farm invasions over two years, only one involved an elephant breaking through the hives; the rest occurred at points in the perimeter that were lined instead with thorn bushes.
King and other researchers have since run dozens of tests across two continents, from Mozambique to South Africa to Thailand, with similar success. They’ve continued fine-tuning, searching for the ideal balance of deterrence and affordability. For example, a 2018 study in Gabon revealed that more hive activity is better — busy bees make for edgy elephants — but not every box necessarily needs to be occupied.
Though farmers have plenty of techniques for guarding their crops (dogs, drums, firecrackers), beehives have the added benefit of a valuable byproduct. By selling the honey, farmers can eventually recoup construction costs, an essential point for winning community buy-in. As an international team of researchers wrote in 2019, “Offsetting economic losses is considered essential to managing human-elephant conflict successfully.”
Read More: Smell Of Angry Bees Scares Elephants Away From Crops
The Role of Bee Pheromones in Repelling Elephants
As it turns out, it’s not just the sound of honey bees that drives elephants away — their scent does the trick just as well. Elephants have a superb sense of smell, with more genes tied to olfactory reception than perhaps any other animal (2,000 to dogs’ 900 or so). Over the past few years, Wright has been investigating how to take advantage of this fact.
In a 2018 paper, he and his colleagues showed that elephants are repelled by the blend of organic molecules in the alarm pheromone bees emit during attacks. He partnered with ISCA Technologies, a California-based biotech firm, to produce a simplified, synthetic version of the pheromone, which they dubbed SPLAT. The pasty substance comes in a large tube that looks like it was made for a caulk gun and can be spread around to discourage probing elephants.
For now, Wright says, it’s “seriously experimental,” and he sees SPLAT as complementing rather than replacing the hive strategy. But when combined, the two could make effective deterrence even more viable for low-income communities.
The idea is to condition elephants to fear the pheromone by setting up actual hives and letting them endure a few assaults. Once they’ve learned to associate that scent with agonizing stings, the hives can be replaced with — cheaper, logistically simpler — synthetic pheromones. This strategy requires fewer colonies since one batch can be moved around a region to condition new elephants (or to reinforce the lesson in those that get complacent over time).
There’s one more bonus: Elephants certainly don’t like SPLAT, but unlike with flesh-and-blood bees, they don’t run screaming away from it. Instead, they back off casually — which, all things considered, is probably for the best: “You don't want 1,000 tons of elephant crashing across the landscape,” Wright says.
Read More: Elephants Have Names for Each Other, and Maybe Their Own Language
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Project director at the conservation non-profit Save the Elephants. Lucy King
Elephants and Bees Project. Welcome to The Elephants and Bees Project
Die Naturwissenschaften. African bees to control African elephants
The Conversation. Are electric fences really the best way to solve human-elephant land conflicts?
Current Biology. African elephants run from the sound of disturbed bees
African Journal of Ecology. Beehive fences as effective deterrents for crop-raiding elephants: field trials in northern Kenya
Conservation Letters. An experimental test of community-based strategies for mitigating human-wildlife conflict around protected areas
Biological Conservation. African honeybees as a mitigation method for elephant impact on trees
Conservation Science and Practice. Beehive fences as a sustainable local solution to human-elephant conflict in Thailand
Current Biology. African bush elephants respond to a honeybee alarm pheromone blend
Cody Cottier is a contributing writer at Discover who loves exploring big questions about the universe and our home planet, the nature of consciousness, the ethical implications of science and more. He holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and media production from Washington State University.
