How bees can keep the peace between elephants and humans

Imagine waking in the middle of the night to an elephant ripping the roof from your house in search of food. This is a reality in some communities in Africa where, as wild spaces shrink, people and elephants are competing for space and resources like never before. In this engaging talk, zoologist Lucy King shares her solution to the rising conflict: fences made from beehives that keep elephants at bay while also helping farmers establish new livelihoods.

Ever since I can remember,

African elephants have filled me
with a sense of complete awe.

They are the largest land mammal
alive today on planet Earth,

weighing up to seven tons,

standing three and a half meters
tall at the shoulder.

They can eat up to 400 kilos
of food in a day,

and they disperse vital plant seeds
across thousands of kilometers

during their 50-to-60-year life span.

Central to their compassionate
and complex society are the matriarchs.

These female, strong leaders
nurture the young

and navigate their way
through the challenges of the African bush

to find food, water and security.

Their societies are so complex,

we're yet to still fully tease apart

how they communicate,
how they verbalize to each other,

how their dialects work.

And we don't really understand yet
how they navigate the landscape,

remembering the safest places
to cross a river.

I'm pretty sure that like me,

most of you in this room
have a similar positive emotional response

to these most magnificent of all animals.

It's really hard not to have
watched a documentary,

learned about their intelligence

or, if you've been lucky,
to see them for yourselves

on safari in the wild.

But I wonder how many of you

have been truly,
utterly terrified by them.

I was lucky to be brought up
in Southern Africa

by two teacher parents

who had long holidays
but very short budgets.

And so we used to take
our old Ford Cortina Estate,

and with my sister, we'd pile in the back,

take our tents and go camping
in the different game reserves

in Southern Africa.

It really was heaven for a young,
budding zoologist like myself.

But I remember even at that young age

that I found the tall electric fences
blocking off the game parks

quite divisive.

Sure, they were keeping elephants
out of the communities,

but they also kept communities
out of their wild spaces.

It really was quite a challenge to me
at that young age.

It was only when I moved to Kenya
at the age of 14,

when I got to connect to the vast,
wild open spaces of East Africa.

And it is here now
that I feel truly, instinctively,

really at home.

I spent many, many happy years
studying elephant behavior in a tent,

in Samburu National Reserve,

under the guideship of professor
Fritz Vollrath and Iain Douglas-Hamilton,

studying for my PhD and understanding
the complexities of elephant societies.

But now, in my role as head
of the human-elephant coexistence program

for Save the Elephants,

we're seeing so much change
happening so fast

that it's urged a change
in some of our research programs.

No longer can we just sit
and understand elephant societies

or study just how to stop the ivory trade,

which is horrific and still ongoing.

We're having to change
our resources more and more

to look at this rising problem
of human-elephant conflict,

as people and pachyderms compete
for space and resources.

It was only as recently as the 1970s

that we used to have 1.2 million elephants
roaming across Africa.

Today, we're edging closer
to only having 400,000 left.

And at the same time period,
the human population has quadrupled,

and the land is being
fragmented at such a pace

that it's really hard to keep up with.

Too often, these migrating elephants
end up stuck inside communities,

looking for food and water

but ending up breaking open water tanks,

breaking pipes

and, of course, breaking
into food stores for food.

It's really a huge challenge.

Can you imagine the terror

of an elephant literally
ripping the roof off your mud hut

in the middle of the night

and having to hold your children away

as the trunk reaches in,
looking for food in the pitch dark?

These elephants
also trample and eat crops,

and this is traditionally eroding away

that tolerance that people
used to have for elephants.

And sadly, we're losing
these animals by the day

and, in some countries, by the hour --

to not only ivory poaching

but this rapid rise
in human-elephant conflict

as they compete for space and resources.

It's a massive challenge.

I mean, how do you keep
seven-ton pachyderms,

that often come in groups of 10 or 12,

out of these very small rural farms

when you're dealing with people

who are living
on the very edge of poverty?

They don't have big budgets.

How do you resolve this issue?

Well, one issue is, you can just start
to build electric fences,

and this is happening across Africa,

we're seeing this more and more.

But they are dividing up areas
and blocking corridors.

And I'm telling you, these elephants
don't think much of it either,

particularly if they're blocking
a really special water hole

where they need water,

or if there's a very attractive
female on the other side.

It doesn't take long
to knock down one of these poles.

And as soon as there's a gap in the fence,

they go back, talk to their mates

and suddenly they're all through,

and now you have 12 elephants
on the community side of the fence.

And now you're really in trouble.

People keep trying to come up
with new designs for electric fences.

Well, these elephants
don't think much of those either.

(Laughter)

So rather than having these hard-line,
straight, electric,

really divisive migratory-blocking fences,

there must be other ways
to look at this challenge.

I'm much more interested in holistic
and natural methods

to keep elephants and people
apart where necessary.

Simply talking to people,

talking to rural pastoralists
in northern Kenya

who have so much knowledge about the bush,

we discovered this story that they had
that elephants would not feed on trees

that had wild beehives in them.

Now this was an interesting story.

As the elephants
were foraging on the tree,

they would break branches
and perhaps break open a wild beehive.

And those bees would fly out
of their natural nests

and sting the elephants.

Now if the elephants got stung,

perhaps they would remember
that this tree was dangerous

and they wouldn't come back
to that same site.

It seems impossible that they could be
stung through their thick skin --

elephant skin is around
two centimeters thick.

But it seems that they sting them
around the watery areas,

around the eyes, behind the ears,
in the mouth, up the trunk.

You can imagine they would
remember that very quickly.

And it's not really one sting
that they're scared of.

African bees have a phenomenal ability:

when they sting in one site,
they release a pheromone

that triggers the rest of the bees
to come and sting the same site.

So it's not one beesting
that they're scared of --

it's perhaps thousands of beestings,

coming to sting in the same area --
that they're afraid of.

And of course, a good matriarch

would always keep her young
away from such a threat.

Young calves have much thinner skins,

and it's potential
that they could be stung

through their thinner skins.

So for my PhD,
I had this unusual challenge

of trying to work out

how African elephants
and African bees would interact,

when the theory was
that they wouldn't interact at all.

How was I going to study this?

Well, what I did was I took the sound
of disturbed African honey bees,

and I played it back to elephants
resting under trees

through a wireless speaker system,

so I could understand how they would react
as if there were wild bees in the area.

And it turns out that they react
quite dramatically

to the sound of African wild bees.

Here we are, playing the bee sounds
back to this amazing group of elephants.

You can see the ears going up, going out,

they're turning their heads
from side to side,

one elephant is flicking her trunk
to try and smell.

There's another elephant
that kicks one of calves on the ground

to tell it to get up
as if there is a threat.

And one elephant triggers a retreat,

and soon the whole family of elephants
are running after her

across the savannah in a cloud of dust.

(Sound of bees buzzing)

(Sound of bees ends)

Now I've done this experiment
many, many times,

and the elephants almost always flee.

Not only do they run away,

but they dust themselves
as they're running,

as if to knock bees out of the air.

And we placed infrasonic microphones
around the elephants

as we did these experiments.

And it turns out they're communicating
to each other in infrasonic rumbles

to warn each other of the threat of bees

and to stay away from the area.

So these behavioral discoveries

really helped us understand
how elephants would react

should they hear or see bee sounds.

This led me to invent a novel design
for a beehive fence,

which we are now building around small,
one-to-two-acre farms

on the most vulnerable
frontline areas of Africa

where humans and elephants
are competing for space.

These beehive fences
are very, very simple.

We use 12 beehives and 12 dummy hives

to protect one acre of farmland.

Now a dummy hive
is simply a piece of plywood

which we cut into squares, paint yellow

and hang in between the hives.

We're basically tricking the elephants

into thinking there are more beehives
than there really are.

And of course, it literally
halves the cost of the fence.

So there's a hive and a dummy hive

and a beehive and now dummy hive,

every 10 meters
around the outside boundary.

They're held up by posts

with a shade roof to protect the bees,

and they're interconnected
with a simple piece of plain wire,

which goes all the way around,
connecting the hives.

So if an elephant tries to enter the farm,

he will avoid the beehive at all cost,

but he might try and push through
between the hive and the dummy hive,

causing all the beehives to swing
as the wire hits his chest.

And as we know from our research work,

this will cause the elephants
to flee and run away --

and hopefully remember
not to come back to that risky area.

The bees swarm out of the hive,

and they really scare the elephants away.

These beehive fences we're studying
using things like camera traps

to help us understand
how elephants are responding

to them at night time,

which is when most
of the crop raiding occurs.

And we found in our study farms

that we're keeping
up to 80 percent of elephants

outside of the boundaries of these farms.

And the bees and the beehive fences
are also pollinating the fields.

So we're having a great reduction
both in elephant crop raids

and a boost in yield
through the pollination services

that the bees are giving
to the crops themselves.

The strength of the beehive fences
is really important --

the colonies have to be very strong.

So we're trying to help farmers
grow pollinator-friendly crops

to boost their hives,

boost the strength of their bees

and, of course, produce
the most amazing honey.

This honey is so valuable as an extra
livelihood income for the farmers.

It's a healthy alternative to sugar,

and in our community,

it's a very valuable present
to give a mother-in-law,

which makes it almost priceless.

(Laughter)

We now bottle up this honey,

and we've called this wild beautiful honey
Elephant-Friendly Honey.

It is a fun name,

but it also attracts
attention to our project

and helps people understand
what we're trying to do

to save elephants.

We're working now with so many women

in over 60 human-elephant conflict sites

in 19 countries in Africa and Asia

to build these beehive fences,

working very, very closely
with so many farmers

but particularly now with women farmers,

helping them to live better
in harmony with elephants.

One of the things we're trying to do
is develop a toolbox of options

to live in better harmony
with these massive pachyderms.

One of those issues
is to try and get farmers,

and women in particular,

to think different
about what they're planting

inside their farms as well.

So we're looking at planting crops

that elephants don't particularly
want to eat, like chillies,

ginger, Moringa, sunflowers.

And of course, the bees and the beehive
fences love these crops too,

because they have beautiful flowers.

One of these plants
is a spiky plant called sisal --

you may know this here as jute.

And this amazing plant
can be stripped down

and turned into a weaving product.

We're working with these amazing women now

who live daily with
the challenges of elephants

to use this plant to weave into baskets

to provide an alternative income for them.

We've just started construction
only three weeks ago

on a women's enterprise center

where we're going to be working
with these women

not only as expert beekeepers

but as amazing basket weavers;

they're going to be processing
chili oils, sunflower oils,

making lip balms and honey,

and we're somewhere on our way
to helping these participating farmers

live with better eco-generating projects
that live and work better

with living with elephants.

So whether it's matriarchs

or mothers or researchers like myself,

I do see more women
coming to the forefront now

to think differently and more boldly
about the challenges that we face.

With more innovation,

and perhaps with some more empathy
towards each other,

I do believe we can move
from a state of conflict with elephants

to true coexistence.

Thank you.

(Applause)