While elephants are major economic assets in generating tourist revenue, crop raiding by elephants is a cause of increasing levels of conflict between local people and wildlife management strategies across Africa. The economic damage caused to small-scale farmers can be crippling.

Unless a cost-effective method of limiting crop damage is found, the pressure on wildlife managers to implement radical methods (such asculling) may become a reality, particularly as population growth in manyAfrican countries is causing farmland encroachment into traditionally game-dominated areas.



Lucy King is STE’s scientific leader for the Elephants and Bees project and is undertaking her DPhil research in association with theAnimal Behaviour Research Group at the Department of Zoology, Oxford University. She is supervised by STE’s Chairman, Prof Fritz Vollrath.

The concept of investigating the relationship between bees and elephants stems from a Save the Elephants research project conducted in 2002 which made the fascinating discovery that trees with beehives received less damage from elephant browsing and bark stripping than trees without beehives (see Publications). This simple idea has led to more complex research questions about species interactions, elephant social learning capabilities and whether or not bees could potentially be used as an ‘eco-barrier’ for bark-stripping or crop-raiding elephants.

The research is divided into two major studies. The first study is being conducted with our study elephants in Samburu and Buffalo Springs Reserves and focuses on understanding the behaviour that occurs when elephants are confronted by bees. In particular we are interested in how their normal,resting, gentle, family foraging behaviour changes when they are ‘threatened’ by bee sounds. To explore this behavioural response Lucy conducted a series ofplayback experiments which involved recording the sound of disturbed wild bees and playing these back to elephant families to film their reactions. Lucy and her assistant Lucas constructed a “fake tree trunk” from a plastic vegetable rack and some brown reeds and cut a small window in the front through which they fitted a wireless speaker. This fake tree trunk was gently placed within 10 meters of the elephants and then they drove off a fair distance. They filmed the response of the elephants before, during, and after the playback of 4 minutes of bee sounds. To check that their responses were not just due to the presence of an unusual loud noise disrupting their peace, the researchers also used natural white noise extracted from a waterfall as a control sound.

The results were dramatic! 16 out of the 17 (94%) elephant herds studied ran orwalked away from the sound of bees within 80 seconds of the sound being played compared to 27% in response to the control sound. One of our resident families, the Artists, actually ran across the full width of the Ewaso Ng’iro river to get away from the bee sound emitting from the fake tree trunk! Quantitative analysis of the behaviour has been published in the journal Current Biology (see Publications). This behavioural study using bee sounds helps us understand how elephants will react to wild bees and enables us to prepare appropriate deterrents. This study has now been expanded into a full communication study using infrasonic recorders to understand how elephants communicate about the threat of bees. This study is being conducted in collaboration with Dr Joseph Soltis from Disney’s Bioacoustic Laboratory in Florida.

As part of the second study, we are now working closely with beekeeping farming communities who are suffering from severe crop raiding and have started some community-based trials testing bees as a deterrent. This is a long term project that will continue through several harvest seasons. Spending time with sufferers of crop raiding can be distressing. We talked to one farmer who was left with only 1/8th of his harvest last season due to elephant depredations.This is the reality of living with elephants outside reserve boundaries. It provides Save the Elephants a constant incentive to continue research into grass-roots level deterrent systems. 

We are grateful for funding from ESRC/NERC for a studentship for Lucy King to support her through Oxford University as well asgenerous donations from Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund, Rufford Small Grants Foundation, The Wingate Foundation and a handful of kind independent donors.  We are sincerely thankful for your ongoing support.

The Elephants and Bees project has featured in two TV documentaries, BBC1’s“The Secret Life of Elephants” (Episode 2) and Discovery Channel’s “Into the Unknown with Josh Bernstein”.