Kenya Beehive Fences
Four community areas in Kenya have now tried beehive fences as a human-elephant conflict (HEC) mitigation tool for reducing elephant crop-raiding.
Our first project site was with the Kikuyu farmers of Ex-Erok in Laikipia, where we experimented with our first design of a beehive fence together using beautiful, traditional and old, log beehives. The trial was very small but successful, with the log beehives eventually producing some valuable honey.
The number of crop-raids was reduced during our initial trial in 2008 (see King et al., 2009) but soon after, the farmers had an expansive electric fence built to protect the whole community from elephant crop-raids.
Our first project site was with the Kikuyu farmers of Ex-Erok in Laikipia, where we experimented with our first design of a beehive fence together using beautiful, traditional and old, log beehives. The trial was very small but successful, with the log beehives eventually producing some valuable honey.
The number of crop-raids was reduced during our initial trial in 2008 (see King et al., 2009) but soon after, the farmers had an expansive electric fence built to protect the whole community from elephant crop-raids.
Our second project site was established in two Turkana sub-villages of Ngare Mara, just south of Save the Elephants’ core project site of Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves. Here we evolved and developed the beehive fence design to incorporate the more advanced Kenyan Top Bar Hive with an embedded queen excluder. Our research here was entirely participatory and all 64 farmers in the community were involved in the project in one way or another.
Eventually, we protected 17 of the farmers’ fields on the front line of elephant crop-raids with beehive fences and compared data from those protected farms to an additional 17 front line farms who were just using traditional thorn barriers. This data formed the bulk of Dr. King’s DPhil thesis work and her results can be download as both publications and as a full pdf of her thesis. It was here in Ngare Mara that we came up with the label “Elephant-Friendly Honey” which has been a marketing success for our honey brand from the beehive fences.
Eventually, we protected 17 of the farmers’ fields on the front line of elephant crop-raids with beehive fences and compared data from those protected farms to an additional 17 front line farms who were just using traditional thorn barriers. This data formed the bulk of Dr. King’s DPhil thesis work and her results can be download as both publications and as a full pdf of her thesis. It was here in Ngare Mara that we came up with the label “Elephant-Friendly Honey” which has been a marketing success for our honey brand from the beehive fences.
Our third, and core project site in Kenya, is with the Taita people of Sagalla next to Tsavo East National Park boundary in southern Kenya. The location makes the community especially vulnerable to human-elephant conflict, with elephants venturing outside the park during the dry season in search of crops. We began the beehive fence project here in 2009 in Mwakoma village and with increased success and enthusiasm from the local people we expanded to Mwambiti Village in 2015. We now have a total of 306 beehives that are protecting 22 farms on the frontline of crop-raiding events. We are primarily using Langstroth beehives in our beehive fences having formed a partnership with the Fair Trade Company, Honey Care Africa, to help adapt the beehives to fit inside the fence design.
Hanging a langstroth hive
Langstroth beehive fence line in Tsavo
The beehive fence protected farms in Sagalla have an average of 80% success rate against crop-raiding elephants. The Elephants and Bees Research Center is based in Mwakoma Village, here we have our friendly project office, the honey processing room and our community training center. These facilities enable us to help neigbouring farming communities and to train farmers and project managers on site from other regions of Kenya and Africa.
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