Bees could be the key to letting farmers coexist safely with elephants.
In northern Botswana, sharing land with elephants is everyday life. Botswana hosts the world’s largest elephant population—about 130,000 individuals—and many farms sit along the routes these giants follow to water sources. A single night of elephant traffic can undo months of hard work in minutes. For rural families, crops aren’t a sideline; they’re the main source of food and income. When elephants pass through fields at the wrong time, the loss can determine whether a family has enough to eat until the next harvest.
Tackling elephant crop damage
"Living with such a large animal and such a large population can be really tricky," says lead author Dr. Tempe Adams, a UNSW Sydney researcher based in Botswana who studies human-elephant conflict. "For farmers here, waking up to find an elephant in the yard isn’t unusual. Helping people live with elephants without conflict is a major focus of my work."
Botswana’s elephants are part of a broader southern African population that migrates across vast landscapes. As conservation efforts improve, elephant numbers have risen in some areas. That’s good for the species, but challenging for people who live along their movement corridors.
Dr. Adams develops and tests ways to deter elephants from crops and property without harming them.
Could bees deter elephants?
A promising idea gaining traction in other parts of Africa involves live bee fences. Elephants in Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Gabon have shown a strong tendency to avoid fences made from live African honeybee hives strung between posts around farms. The memory of painful stings from swarms appears to encourage elephants to stay away.
"We’re in a very dry region with Kalahari sandy soil, and each elephant range has its own environmental factors," notes Dr. Adams. "Testing the concept carefully first was crucial."
Rather than immediately installing long beehive fences, Adams began with a cheaper, smaller test: playing recordings of buzzing bees for wild elephants and observing their reactions.
What the bee sounds revealed
Some elephants turned and left quickly after hearing the bee recordings; others remained in place. Data showed more elephants reacted to bee sounds with a medium or strong response than to white-noise controls. In field terms, 53.3% of family units reacted within their resting areas, compared with 26.6% in control trials. Four family units moved more than about 65 feet during bee playbacks, while only one did so in the control condition.
"That in itself is an amazing result," Dr. Adams remarks. She cautions that in science, only reporting what’s statistically significant isn’t enough. It’s essential to understand the nuanced, individual responses of elephants, highly sentient beings, when evaluating behavioral data.
The bees aren’t a universal fix. Not every elephant in Botswana will have encountered bees, but those that have learned to flee when bees are heard. This suggests that bee deterrents could be context- or region-specific and not a one-size-fits-all solution. More research is needed to dig into why these results vary by location.
Why Botswana elephants react differently
One clue lies in the bees themselves: wild bee populations in northern Botswana are relatively low. Dr. Adams explains that opening a jar of honey to attract bees can take days or weeks here, meaning fewer opportunities for elephants to encounter stings. With fewer bees, elephants may have less reason to fear buzzing.
The causes are layered: dry conditions, a short flowering season, limited agriculture, and long distances without reliable water all challenge bees and their ability to thrive.
Working out the broader bee picture may be more impactful than further elephant-focused studies. Is the bee status linked to climate change, disease, or could boosting local bee populations help both pollination and conflict reduction?
Farm life on the frontline
In northern Botswana, most farmers cultivate small plots—roughly 2 to 7 acres—using traditional methods like donkey- or cattle-drawn plows rather than tractors. This farming is family-centered and tied to livelihoods, not mass-scale production. The dry climate supports limited large-scale farming.
Typically, planting occurs after the rains and harvesting during the dry season. Waterholes fill with elephants at that time, while maize, sorghum, and millet ripen near elephant routes. Elephants are attracted by water and opportunistically by ripe crops, making even a single raid enough to devastate a family’s yearly food security.
Elephants and bee responses during testing
The bee-sound study took place in Chobe National Park during the dry season, focusing on elephants resting on the ground to minimize movement and reveal clean reactions to sound.
Dr. Adams hopes to replicate the test in other Botswana regions, particularly near the country’s few commercial farms, to see how local conditions influence elephant responses.
Meanwhile, attention is turning to bees themselves: could increasing bee numbers help both crop pollination and conflict prevention in certain areas?
This research was supported by Elephants Without Borders and co-authored by Dr. Lucy King of Save the Elephants, who pioneered the beehive fence approach in East Africa. The full study appears in Pachyderm journal.
If this sparked your curiosity, consider subscribing to our newsletter for more updates, or explore EarthSnap, a free app that brings together similar insights and stories.
