Widlife-human conflict are a common thing in most part of Africa, but a new wire fence booby-trapped with beehives has come to the rescue of African farmers who have for years suffered the wrath of hungry elephants and other wild animals invading their plantations.

The project, which is a collaboration between Save the Elephants, the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund, studies how to use the African bush elephants’ instinctive avoidance of African honey bees to prevent crop losses.

Lucy King, the leader of the Elephant and Bees project in Kenya told Trust.org that they have come up with ‘Beehive fences’ that prevent the Jumbos from invading farmers lands while at the same time facilitating crop pollination as the honey-makers gather nectar. They also provide the communities with honey.

The ‘Beehive fences’, which are already in use in three communities in Kenya, have also been adopted in Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda by UK charity Save the Elephant.

“Hives are hung every 30 feet and linked together,” King told Trust.org. “If an elephant touches one of the hives or the interconnecting wires, the beehives all along the fence swing and release the stinging insects.”

King said conflicts between farmers and elephants are a growing problem, with the animals’ encroachment onto farms causing massive crop losses. But the beehive’s, which are constructed by cheap readily available material are coming in handy to provide a natural solution for a persistent problem.

She says that a pilot study she led involving 34 farms on the edge of two farming communities in northern Kenya found beehive fences to be an effective elephant deterrent compared with traditional thorn bush barriers.

A study published the African Journal of Ecology in 2011 showed that elephants made 14 attempts to enter farmland and 13 of these were unsuccessful. In each case the elephants were forced to turn away from the area after confronting a beehive fence or walk the length of the fence to choose an easier entry point through a thorn bush.

“… not only do elephants run from bee sounds, but they also have an alarm call that alerts family members to retreat from a possible bee threat,” King said.

While electric fences are effective in preventing elephants from getting to human areas, the difficulty in getting electricity to the rural areas of Africa has made it unrealistic to use it where the jumbo’s encroachment were common, which has lead to huge losses for the farmers.

King told Trust.org farmers and conservation agencies have focused recently on the effectiveness of farmer-based deterrents such as fire crackers, dogs or drums, but the use of beehive fences has proven more successful.