Encroaching human development into former wildlife areas [1] is compressing African elephants into ever smaller home ranges, causing increased levels of human-elephant conflict [2]. African honeybees have been proposed as a possible deterrent to elephants [3]. We have performed a sound playback experiment to study this hypothesis. We found that a significant majority of elephants, in a sample of 18 well-known families and subgroups of varying sizes, reacted negatively - immediately walking or running away - when they heard the buzz of disturbed bees, while they ignored the control sound of natural white-noise. Whether the observed response was the result of individual conditioning or of learning by social facilitation remains to be established. Our study strongly supports the hypothesis that bees - and perhaps even their buzz alone - may be deployed to keep elephants at bay.
展开▼
