Bengaluru: Imagine a herd of elephants, the largest animal with an equally intelligent brain, being shooed away by the tiny honey bees. One may call this exaggeration but this is a reality in the forests of Karnataka.
Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) on Monday launched a unique project of creating “bee-fences” to mitigate human-elephant conflicts in the country. The objective of Project RE-HAB (Reducing Elephant – Human Attacks using Bees) is to thwart elephant attacks in human habitations using honey bees and thus reduce fatalities of humans as well as retaliatory deaths of elephants in the hands of humans. The pilot project was launched at 4 locations around village Chelur in the Kodagu district of Karnataka today by KVIC Chairman Shri Vinai Kumar Saxena. These spots are located on the periphery of Nagarhole National Park and Tiger Reserve and are known to be human-elephant conflict zones. The total cost of the project is just Rs 15 lakh.
Project RE-HAB is a sub-mission of KVIC’s National Honey Mission. While the Honey Mission is a programme to increase the bee population, honey production and beekeepers’ income by setting up apiaries, Project RE-HAB uses bee boxes as a fence to prevent the attack of elephants.
KVIC has set up 15-20 interspersed bee boxes at each of the four locations. The bee boxes are set up in the passageways of elephant-human conflict zones to block the entrance of elephants to human habitations. The boxes are connected with a string so that when elephants attempt to pass through, a tug or pull causes the bees to swarm the elephant herds and dissuade them from progressing further. Bee boxes have been placed on the ground as well as hung from the trees to block the passageway of elephants. High resolution, night vision cameras have been installed at strategic points to record the impact of bees on elephants and their behaviour in these zones.
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KVIC Chairman Vinai Kumar Saxena said this unique initiative has been taken as a sustainable resolution to the human-elephant conflicts that are common in several parts of the country. “It has been scientifically recorded that elephants are annoyed and even frightened of honey bees. Elephants fear that the bee swarms can bite their sensitive inner side of the trunk and eyes. The collective buzz of the bees is annoying to elephants that force them to return. Elephants, who are the most intelligent animal and carry their memories for long, avoid returning to the place where they have encountered honey bees,” Saxena said.
“The biggest advantage of Project RE-HAB is that it dissuades elephants without causing any harm to them. Besides, it is extremely cost-effective as compared to various other measures like digging trenches or erecting fences,” Saxena added.
Nearly 500 people die every year due to elephant attacks in India. This is nearly 10 times more than the fatalities caused by big cats across the country. From 2015 to 2020, nearly 2500 people have lost their lives in elephant attacks. Out of this, nearly 170 human fatalities have been reported in Karnataka alone. On the contrary, nearly one-fifth of this number, i.e. nearly 500 elephants have also died in retaliation by humans in the last 5 years.
In the past, governments have spent crores of rupees on digging up trenches and erecting fences to dissuade elephants. Also, hundreds of crores of rupees have been spent on compensation for the loss of human lives. These trenches and barbed wire fences have often caused the deaths of elephant calves and thus rendering these ideas largely impractical.
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Earlier, Central Bee Research and Training Institute, Pune, which is a unit of KVIC, had conducted field trials of creating “bee-fences” in Maharashtra to mitigate elephant attacks. However, this is for the first time, KVIC has launched this project in totality.
KVIC has roped in the College of Forestry under the University of Agriculture and Horticultural Sciences, Ponnampet, for impact assessment of the project. KVIC Chief Advisor (Strategy & Sustainable Development) Dr R Sudarshana and Dr CG Kushalappa, Dean of the College of Forestry, were present on the occasion.
