Elephants and Bees

Martin Kunz

I have spent most of my working life (since the mid 1970s) in or in contact with Asian countries. My interest in bees came comparatively late – only ten years ago, but the issue of Human Elephant Conflicts got onto my radar quickly. There are simply too many of us (humans), in ever growing numbers, and fewer areas left for a declining elephant population.

So when I learned about Dr. King’s work with elephant fencing in Kenya, I was keen to find out if they might work in an Asian setting, too, and it was great to find out that Kylie had done a trial in Sri Lanka: Key parameters that differ from Kenya are, of course: The elephant species differ (African vs. Asian), the bee species differ …

When I read Kylie’s article my first question concerned the suitability of Langstroth Hives - for keeping the local A. cerana . From my limited experience with A. cerana these hives are too big for the smaller bees – making it hard for them to turn them into suitable homes – possibly increasing their (already fairly big) tendency to abscond.

However, I doubt that even with hives with a more appropriate size the results would have been different: It seems that A. cerana simply seem to be unsuitable for fences because of their tendency to abscond– which was also reported from another trial in Thailand, and of being non-aggressive…

The Thai project therefore used A. mellifera in their fencing trial which, too, seems to have had some limited success with the local Asian elephants, but not sufficient. So questions remain: Is this because the strain of A. mellifera in Thailand is less aggressive than the African Apis mellifera scutellata? Is it because of the Asian elephants? Either way the conclusion I draw is:

Bee fences do not seem to work sufficiently well in Asia – and people more competent than me have come to the same conclusion: Shany Dror et al. conclude in their Article “Are Asian elephants afraid of honeybees? Exper- imental studies in northern Thailand” (where they actually tested A. mellifera and A. cerana next to each other) “neither … are likely to be effective in deterring wild Asian elephants from entering crop fields.”

I would, however, hope for someone to do one more trial: Use stingless bees (trigona): They are easy to keep in (hanging) clay pots. They are great pollinators for nearby fields/crops. And while they don’t sting, they definitely can be very annoying by going into small dark places like (possibly) ears, eyes, and trunks of elephants. But will they come out when disturbed at night and will it be enough to scare off the elephants? I hope someone takes on this ‘final’ challenge.

Screen grab picture of an elephant avoiding a fence in Thailand.