Defending small farms with a small solution: The use of beehive fences to resolve conflict between farmers and elephants in Africa

Escalating human-elephant conflicts due to increasing habitat fragmentation and human population growth in Africa remains one of the greatest unresolved challenges for conservation.

Although many people in the West admire and love elephants, they often inspire fear and anger in those who share the land. These conflicts are especially apparent between small-scale farmers and free-ranging African elephants (Loxodonta Africana). Small scale farmers tend to be very poor and are economically and nutritionally vulnerable. They often build their farms within prime elephant habitat and can lose their entire farms (or their lives) overnight as a result of elephants raids and destruction of crops.

Consequently, farmers often kill elephants in retaliation, aid poachers, or block tourist activities. Just last year wildlife authorities in Kenya shot about 100 problem elephants as a result of human-wildlife conflict interactions. In the last century, the African elephant population has declined from 3-5 million to 470,000-690,000 individuals.

Attempts to address this problem have manifested in a variety of ways including the creation of wildlife corridors and national parks, chili and tobacco based deterrents, growing crops which repel elephants or crops that elephants don’t like, flashing solar lights, ditches, guard dogs, and making farms easier to defend.

Criticisms of these mitigation methods include high establishment cost, elephant habituation, farmer fatigue, lack of funding for on-going costs, and poor uptake by the farming community. Most success stories use multiple types of mitigation and may even rotate methods to reduce habituation.

One emerging mitigation method for use on small scale farms involved creating a beehive fence around the parameter of the farm. Elephants are cautious of foraging near African honey bees and will run away from their buzzing sound or the threat of being stung. A recent study examined the effectiveness of beehive fences on small farms near Tsavo East National Park. The study found that about eighty percent of the nearly 260 elephants that entered the community farming area were kept out of the areas bordered by beehive fences.

In addition to keeping unwanted elephants from entering farming areas during the crop-ripening season, farmers benefited financially from the sale of elephant-friendly honey. As news of the study’s success spread, adoption of the mitigation method technique increased amongst the local farming community until 22 farms were using the mitigation technique by the end of 2015.

Alleviating the financial, emotional, and physical stress small scale farmers endure in Africa by crop raiding species like elephants also helps maintain biodiversity within ecosystems. The connection between biodiversity and a sustainable future is becoming more apparent the closer we look. Thus it is important for conservation efforts to succeed and the support of local communities that share the land with species of concern is critical.

Bibliography

Lucy E. King, Fredrick Lala, Hesron Nzumu, Emmanuel Mwambingu, and Iain Douglas-Hamilton. 2017. “Beehive Fences as a Multidimensional Conflict-Mitigation Tool for Farmers Coexisting with Elephants.” Conservation Biology 31 (4): 743–52.

“WWF African Elephant Programme | WWF.” 2017. Accessed August 8. http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/elephants/african_elephants/elephant_programme/.