We like the idea that elephants are scared of mice because it’s comically endearing to imagine a 7-ton behemoth cowering before a furball the size of its toenail. Unfortunately the cartoons lied — it isn’t true. But there’s another creature, even smaller, that really does strike fear into the hearts of pachyderms everywhere: the humble honey bee.
Since the turn of the century, study after study has detailed how the sight, sound, and even smell of bees has the power to repel elephants. In an era of rising conflict between the world’s largest land animals and their human neighbors — elephants are notorious crop raiders throughout sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia — this research has pointed the way to a more harmonious relationship. It offers new possibilities for deterrence, protecting the livelihoods of poor farmers and the lives of the “problem animals” themselves, who are often killed for their offenses.
Lucy King, project director at the conservation non-profit Save the Elephants, and prominent elephant researcher described the problem in a 2019 TED talk. “We’re dealing with people who are living on the very edge of poverty,” she says. “They don’t have big budgets. How do you resolve this issue?”
How We Know Elephants are Scared of Bees
A new answer to that question began to emerge in the early 2000s when Oxford researchers Fritz Vollrath and Iain Douglas-Hamilton — now the chairman and CEO, respectively, of Save the Elephants — learned from pastoralists in northern Kenya that elephants refused to feed from trees with active hives.
