“We used to hate elephants a lot,” Kenyan farmer Charity Mwangome says, pausing from her work under the shade of a baobab tree.
Her hatred has subsided in part because of the bees humming in the background.
The small 58-year-old claimed that in her property, which is situated between two sections of Kenya’s famous Tsavo National Park, voracious elephants frequently ruin months of labour.
The animals are hated by the majority of local farmers, who are the backbone of the Kenyan economy, but they are adored by visitors, who account for about 10% of the country’s GDP.
Elephant conservation has been a huge success; according to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), the number of elephants in Tsavo increased from about 6,000 in the mid-1990s to about 15,000 in 2021.
However, the human population also grew, infringing on the herds’ grazing and migration paths.
Resulting clashes are becoming the number one cause of elephant deaths, says KWS.
Refused compensation when she lost her crops, Mwangome admits she was mad with the conservationists.
But a long-running project by charity Save the Elephants offered her an unlikely solution — deterring some of nature’s biggest animals with some of its smallest: African honeybees.
Cheery yellow beehive fences now protect several local plots, including Mwangome’s. A nine-year study published last month found that elephants avoided farms with the ferocious bees 86 percent of the time.
“The beehive fences came to our rescue,” said Mwangome.
