African elephants run from the sound of disturbed bees

Encroaching human development into former wildlife areas is compressing African elephants into ever smaller home ranges, causing increased levels of human–elephant conflict. African honeybees have been proposed as a possible deterrent to elephants. 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.