Bees for Elephants: Butterfly Pavilion's Bee Fencing Project

Bee Fencing Project

Butterfly Pavilion supports the spread of beehive fencing to new communities in Africa and Asia to mitigate human-elephant conflict.

As rural communities grow in Africa and Asia, they are increasingly developing homesteads and croplands in areas that were previously open habitat that wildlife, such as elephants, migrated through. Especially in movement areas around national parks, this has led to increased interactions between humans and wildlife, often leading to conflict. As elephant habitat shrinks due to human development, they become desperate for food and water resources and will enter communities to raid crop fields and food and water storage. A single elephant can destroy a farmer’s crops in just one night. This threatens human lives and livelihoods, leads to physical conflicts, and increases negative community sentiments towards elephants and elephant conservation. This conflict can sometimes result in more elephant deaths than poaching, making it necessary to reduce these negative interactions.

Elephant deterrent methods such as electrical fences, thorn barriers, loud noises, fire, and gunshots have been used in an attempt to mitigate human-elephant conflict. However, these methods are often difficult to sustain in the long-term and elephants quickly find ways around them. One human-elephant conflict mitigation tool that has been proven to be successful and sustainable is beehive fencing. Beehive fencing (developed by Dr. Lucy King of Save the Elephants) uses hanging beehives around crops and homes to deter elephants from entering areas, leveraging their natural fear of African honey bees.

You might be thinking: “elephants are so large and their skin is so thick! How can these tiny invertebrates protect against huge elephants?” African honey bees may look like our honey bees in the U.S. – however, they are much more defensive of their colonies! When an elephant tries to move through the fence to access crops, it pushes the wire and shakes the connected hives. The hive disturbance alerts guard bees which then defend their hives by stinging the elephant around its sensitive ears, eyes, and trunk. African honey bees will readily send thousands of worker bees out to sting intruders. Even the sound of bees causes elephants to run away, and overtime, they learn to avoid these bee-fenced areas and teach their family groups to do the same.

Besides defending against elephants, beehive fences have the benefits of being easily managed by people within the community, involving locally available materials, providing pollination to crops, and providing a supplemental income to farmers through the sale of wax and honey. Therefore, maintaining hives provides an opportunity for local livelihood enhancement. It is estimated that, within three years of fence construction, communities become self-sufficient in maintaining the fences and selling the honey, propolis, and wax harvested from the hives. Butterfly Pavilion saw the great potential of beehive fencing to not only protect elephants, but also promote the conservation of native honey bee species and pollinator habitat in communities in Africa and Asia.

Timeline:

In 2018, Butterfly Pavilion launched the Bee Fencing Project in collaboration with the Katie Adamson Conservation Fund (KACF), Denver Zoo, and the Health and Environmental Management Society (HEMS) in Nepal. Butterfly Pavilion traveled to a community just outside of Nepalgunj, Nepal, adjacent to Bardia National Park to establish beehives. Butterfly Pavilion experts trained community members in beekeeping techniques.

In 2019, Butterfly Pavilion expanded our Bee Fencing Project to Tanzania. Butterfly Pavilion experts traveled to Lamadi, Tanzania, near Serengeti National Park, to donate beekeeping equipment, build hives, and train community members in beekeeping.

In 2021, we began planning with the Tanzanian Elephant Foundation to expand our Bees for Elephants Program to communities outside of Nyerere National Park in southern Tanzania and Mkomazi National Park in northern Tanzania. In 2022, we built a 0.55-kilometer beehive fence in Kisiwani, Tanzania to protect crop fields from elephants entering the community from Mkomazi National Park. The hives were occupied by wild honey bee colonies only three hours into hanging them! We also added new hives to a beehive fence in Kisemo and pulled honey frames from a beehive fence in Kisaki. We supported beekeeping training in these three communities and donated beekeeping equipment to Kisiwani so that they can safely manage their fence and hives. We look forward to expanding the fence in Kisiwani so that it will eventually be a 4-kilometer barrier to elephants trying to enter the community.

Butterfly Pavilion continues to lead this initiative, and regularly returns to these communities to help with problem solving. For example, if there are issues or diseases that the bees are struggling with, we can come out to troubleshoot them and find solutions. Overall, bee fencing has proven to have a 98% effectiveness in most areas that we’ve worked in when it comes to decreasing human-elephant conflicts.

Butterfly Pavilion’s bee fencing projects in Tanzania uplifts local communities by protecting humans and their livelihoods, preserving the local wildlife and ecosystems by reducing elephant deaths and promoting pollinator population, and ensure sustained management and continued collaboration within these communities across the globe.

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Photos by Rich Reading