Farmers are turning bees into unexpected helpers to keep elephants off their crops.

Around the world, spreading farmland is increasingly overlapping with elephant habitats, often resulting in dangerous interactions as elephants roam over people's crops. But in Kenya, after decades of investigation, researchers have come up with a simple but ingenious solution to deter elephants: strings of beehive fences.

Inspired by longtime local knowledge of elephants' dislike of beehives, these buzzing barriers are offering a gentle but effective way of de-escalating the sometimes-violent interactions between farmers and elephants. And they are now spreading across the world, from Mozambique to Thailand.

So what is it about bees that elephants hate so much? And can they really be expected to keep the peace in this ever more crowded world?

Human-elephant conflict is a growing issue in several areas. In Kenya, where the population and demand for resources is growing, human-inhabited areas are increasingly overlapping with elephant's ranges. Combined with the recovery of some elephant populations, this is leading to greater chance of conflict between humans and these giants.

"Expansion of agricultural land, logging, urbanisation, and shrinking and fragmentation of elephant habitats – wildlife that require large spaces of land – [are] forcing elephants to enter human settlements in search of food and water," says Greta Francesca Iori, an Ethiopia-based advisor on elephant conservation and human-elephant conflict for several governments and non-profits.

"Wherever there are elephants, there are instances and information coming through of human-elephant conflict."

Graeme Shannon, a wildlife ecologist at Bangor University in Wales, UK, who has studied African elephants for two decades, notes that the people pushed into these areas are often of poorer backgrounds. "So farming is crucial for them and their families."

But water and lush, highly nutritional crops can be very appealing for elephants, leading them close to human settlements.

People take a lot of time caring for their land, then the elephants come "when you have planted the crops and they are almost mature", says Emmanuel Mwamba, a farmer who lives in Mwakoma, Kenya, a village at the frontline of human-elephant conflict. "If elephants come there… everything is gone."

"Some of us […] rely on crops for subsistence", adds Mwamba. "Imagine if that was destroyed within a night."

Such encounters can be fatal for both sides. Farmers can die trying to stop hungry, seven-tonne elephants from entering their crops, while the elephants can end up getting killed by humans for happening upon a good meal.

To prevent these conflicts, scientists and locals have spent decades testing a variety of solutions to deter elephants, from electric fences, watchtowers and solar spotlights to chilli-greased bricks and smelly elephant repellents, or even simply using noises to scare the elephants – all with their own pros and cons.

But using bees to scare away elephants has emerged as a particularly promising and efficient tool, combining effective deterrence with a host of other benefits for farmers.

It all started back in the early 2000s, when Fritz Vollrath, an ecologist at the University of Oxford and chairman of charity Save the Elephants, and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save The Elephants, heard a folklore story from Kenyan pastoralists about how trees in certain areas were not........

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