The Elephant and Bee Project in Tanzania
The Tiny Insect Standing Between Mafuluto and Disaster
Picture it: you’ve spent months tending your farm. The rains finally come. Your crops are nearly ready. And then, in a single night, a herd of elephants walks out of the national park next door and flattens everything.
That’s not a hypothetical. In the space of 4 days in May, over 50 farmers in the village of Mafuluto on the edge of Ruaha National Park in Tanzania lost their entire crop. Whole harvests gone in just one night. Livelihoods wiped out before breakfast. This is devastating for hundreds of people every year.
Here’s the strange part: the solution isn’t a wall, a trench, or a gun. It’s a bee.
Why Elephants Are Terrified of Bees
It sounds almost like a joke – the largest land animal on Earth, intimidated by something it could crush without trying. But it’s real, and it’s been proven with research led by Dr Lucy King (Save the Elephants).
Elephants have thin, sensitive skin around their eyes, ears, and trunk, and a bee sting there hurts. They don’t even need to be stung to react – the sound of disturbed bees alone is enough to send a whole herd running, trumpeting warnings to each other as they go.
That fear is now being turned into protection. Hang a line of beehives along the boundary between farmland and the bush, space them roughly ten metres apart, and elephants generally won’t cross it.
Studies tracking these “beehive fences” across Kenya have found they deter elephants up to 86% of the time during the riskiest crop seasons. This isn’t guesswork. It’s one of the most evidence-backed tools conservationists have for keeping people, crops, and elephants safe from each other.
The Mafuluto Beehive Fence Project
Working with Emmanuel International Tanzania, partnered with the Diocese of Ruaha, the community in Mafuluto is building a 6km line of beehives – 300 real hives and 300 decoys – right along the path the elephants have been taking into the farms and towards the village. They are working with around 60 local beekeepers who are being trained to build it, manage it, and eventually train others in neighbouring villages to do the same…
Our Mama Hive connection to this project is with our own Rachel Monger. She has a decade of hands-on experience training Tanzanian farmers to keep bees, and has worked with the beekeepers that supply our special Mama Hive honey in the Mwanza region.
She is supporting Ibruhimu Abdul, the Emmanuel International Iringa Project Manager, and as the project moves forward, we look forward to partnering with the Mafuluto group to share their honey and value-added beeswax products!
More Than a Fence: Honey, Beeswax and New Income
And here’s what makes this more than just a fence: those same bees pollinate the crops they’re protecting, increasing its yield, and they produce honey and beeswax the beekeepers can sell.
Women in Mafuluto are being trained not only to build and manage the hives, but also to turn the beeswax into products they can take to market – a genuinely new income stream, in a place where beekeeping has traditionally been something only men did.
Why This Matters Beyond One Village
When elephants destroy a season’s crops, the consequences ripple on for the whole year – with a lack of food security, debt, children pulled out of school to make ends meet.
Elephants roaming the village are dangerous; just last month a farmer lost his life in a neighbouring village protecting his farm, and elephants have come right up to the school and dispensary in the heart of the village. And when farmers feel they have no protection, the elephants pay too, sometimes with their lives, in retaliation killings that conservationists are desperate to prevent.
A beehive fence breaks that cycle without a single shot fired. It keeps elephants out of the village and alive in the park. It keeps families fed. And it hands a community a new way to earn a living that didn’t exist before.
Our Mama Hive connection to this project is with our own Rachel Monger. She has a decade of hands-on experience training Tanzanian farmers to keep bees and has worked with the beekeepers that supply our special Mama Hive honey in the Mwanza region.
Rachel is supporting Ibruhimu Abdul, the Emmanuel International Iringa Project Manager, and as the project moves forward we look forward to partnering with the Mafuluto group to share their honey and value-added beeswax products!
This is exactly the kind of project Mama Hive exists to champion – small, smart, bee-powered solutions that change lives. But right now, Mafuluto needs hives, training, and time – and that takes funding.
How You Can Help Build This Fence
Sometimes the smallest creatures really do make the biggest difference.
Right now, in Mafuluto, that’s not a metaphor – it’s the plan.