Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 49
E NV I RO NM ENT
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GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
in Kenya, however, suggested that small cages can be
placed around hives to prevent them from being disturbed by these other foragers. The dry seasons, too,
can dampen bee populations in hives as they flee and
search for moister climes.
But the elephant intellect, says Gonçalves, proves
the biggest obstacle to a static set of beehive fences.
They have not, for instance, deterred clever elephants
from seeking out alternative crossing points and taking
up near-permanent residence in the buffer zone.
Indeed, Stalmans says, sometimes a traditional, or
even electric, fence is the best resort—but even those
prove, over time, to be no match to an elephant’s keen
navigational sense. Just as they are smart enough not
to get stung or shocked, they’re also smart enough to
simply chart routes around most human-made impediments and find their way to nearby farm settlements.
It is here that Gonçalves joins efforts with Gorongosa’s human-wildlife coexistence team. Together, they
chart the peregrinations of known elephant families
that have been collared with GPS devices and can
thereby spot areas of potential human-elephant conflict before they erupt.
The bee has the power to
terrify a mammal that’s
22 million times its size.
effective. King and her co-authors surmised that the
coating weighed the twine down, making it easier for
elephants to simply step over it.)
Cameras placed near fences involving beehives
showed that the elephants would trip the bailing twine,
thus shaking the suspended beehives. Immediately, this
would stir the bees to action, and they would swarm
and mount an attack. In footage taken at night, shadowy silhouettes of peeved elephants can be seen turning tail and lolloping in unison out of the frame.
The true beauty of this method, write Branco and her
coauthors in the study, is that it allows discontinuous
fencing to block key corridors used by elephants as they
go on crop raids rather than fencing individual farms or
entire nature preservers, like Gorongosa—which both
for the farmers and the park could prove prohibitively
expensive, running into the thousands and even tens of
thousands of dollars. To build 15 hives and string them
from posts, Branco and her team spent a total of $773.
The results at Gorongosa jibed with those from
another field study that King conducted in Kenya in
2017.2 In that experiment, researchers strung beehive
fences around 10 farms that were located near a nature
preserve, reducing elephant raids by 80 percent. Bee
fences have also been found to be an effective deterrent
against crop raiding Asian elephants, showed a 2018
study King conducted in Sri Lanka.3 In that case, merely
playing recordings of angry bees through speakers in
the field was enough to cause the elephants to flee.
Gonçalves says the bee barriers set an important
precedent for future conservation efforts by offering
a nonlethal method of control that doesn’t create divisions between the park and the people who live near it.
Bee fences alone aren’t enough. Other animals that
are less flustered by bees, such as baboons and honey
badgers, can be drawn to the honey the bees produce,
disturbing the hives to the point at which the bees
themselves take flight and move out. King’s studies
Charles Digges is an environmental journalist and
researcher who edits Bellona.org, the website of the Norwegian
environmental group Bellona.
R EFERENCES
1. Branco, P.S., et al. An experimental test of communitybased strategies for mitigating human-wildlife conflict around
protected areas. Conservation Letters 13, e12679 (2019).
2. King, L.E., Lala, F., Nzumu, H., Mwanbingu, E., & DouglasHamilton, I. Beehive fences as a multidimensional conflictmitigation tool for farmers coexisting with elephants.
Conservation Biology 31, 743-752 (2017).
3. King, L., et al. Wild Sri Lankan elephants retreat from the
sound of disturbed African honey bees. Current Biology 28,
R64-R65 (2018).
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