Beehive fences cut crop raids by elephants to near zero
Farmers on the edge of the restoration block hung beehives on wires between posts. Elephants avoid bees, so they avoid the fence. Raids on the maize behind it dropped from weekly to none in five months.
Elephants raiding crops is the fastest way to turn a community against a forest project. A family that loses a third of its maize to a herd in one night does not much care that the forest stores carbon. On the eastern edge of the Kenya Highlands restoration block, raids had become a weekly event by the start of last year.
The beehive fence is a simple idea borrowed from work done in Tsavo. Posts are set along the field edge with a wire strung between them, and hives are hung from the wire every ten metres or so. When an elephant pushes the wire, the hives swing and the bees come out. Elephants will not stand for bees near their eyes and trunk, so they learn the line and keep off it.
The farmers on this block hung the hives themselves once the Kanam women's cooperative had shown them how. We helped pay for the first 60 hives and the training, and the cooperative supplied the colonies from its own stock.
Raids on the maize behind the fence dropped from weekly to none across five months. That is the figure the farmers keep, in a notebook one of them volunteered to fill in after each night. We did not expect it to work quite that cleanly, and we are watching for the elephants to test the line again as the next dry season pushes them toward the fields.
The honey is the farmers' to keep and sell. A working hive on this flower mix earns real money in the nearest town, enough that several households have asked for more hives than the crop strictly needs.
The forest gets the part that matters to us. It now has a neighbour who is no longer losing a chunk of the harvest to it, and who has a reason of their own to want bees, flowers and standing trees along the boundary.
