Voi, (APP – UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News – 12th Nov, 2024) “We used to hate elephants a lot,” Kenyan farmer Charity Mwangome says, pausing from her work under the shade of a baobab tree.
The bees humming in the background are part of the reason why her hatred has dimmed.
The diminutive 58-year-old said rapacious elephants would often destroy months of work in her farmland that sits between two parts of Kenya’s world-renowned Tsavo National Park.
Beloved by tourists — who contribute around 10 percent of Kenya’s GDP — the animals are loathed by most local farmers, who form the backbone of the nation’s economy.
Elephant conservation has been a roaring success: numbers in Tsavo rose from around 6,000 in the mid-1990s to almost 15,000 elephants in 2021, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).
But the human population also expanded, encroaching on grazing and migration routes for the herds.
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.
