14 DAY TRIAL // In Kenya, people are encouraged by the local government to settle down on stretches of land, and to start cultivating vegetables of fruits, in small farms that have the potential to boost the national production levels considerably. However, a recent problem is that elephants have no respect for fences, and simply waltz in, consuming everything they can find. Thus far, the farmers resorted to shooting or poisoning the beasts, but now a new method, employing nothing more than wood, wires and beehives, seems to be just as effective in keeping them away as anything else.
The new defense system relies on the innate fear that the large animals have of African honeybees. Whenever the two meet in nature, it's most often the elephant that backs out of a direct confrontation. Aware of that, a team constructed a rudimentary fence in a small test aware, made up of wooden pillars, wires between the pillars, and beehives spread out at close intervals. After the barrier was installed, they noticed that the number of elephant attacks in the area decreased by more than 50 percent, which hints at the fact that the method actually works, and pretty efficiently at that too.
In charge of the tests were experts from the University of Oxford, in the UK, who collaborated with colleagues from the charity Save the Elephants. The need for their intervention was made imperative by the fact that, in Kenya, the elephants are not confined to national parks or reservations, such as in other African nations, BBC News reports. The experts selected the southern region of Laikipia for their tests, because here people complained of regular breaches on their farms.
The fences were installed on a single farm, while a nearby house was left unguarded, for control purposes. In the former, 38 individual elephants reached the fields behind the barrier, whereas, in the latter, more than 95 did so. However, the researchers said, the beehives in the fence were unpopulated, which led to the conclusion that simply seeing the structures was enough to deter the large animals from their attempted assault on the crops.