Elephants are scared around bees | Hacker News Reader

Elephants are scared around bees

nautil.us

171 pointsdnetesn104 comments

My son befriended one of the leading African elephant researchers who is now one of the big wigs at Disney's Animal Kingdom. When we met him, he explained how researchers used this knowledge to teach African villages how to become beekeepers. Elephants would often trample their crops or other areas of the village, so they taught them how to keep bees around the perimeter of the village. The elephants stay away and the villagers are able to use the honey, etc. as a trade. The net result was fewer elephants were being killed and the villagers gained a new skill.

Additional net effect: crops were better - fertilized.

Random bee fact: each workerbee trip returns ~40mg nectar to the hive.

<3 Not Your Beekeeper

> Random bee fact: each workerbee trip returns ~40mg nectar to the hive.

And it takes them approximately 1 hour and 1,000 flower visits in order to collect enough nectar or pollen to fill up for the return trip. It is so taxing that the muscles in their wings wear out after around 2 weeks.

Bees live 30-60 days it seems.

Queens live up to 5 years but 2-3 on average, just spawning new ephemeral pods to do work.

It depends. Winter worker bees live several months. Summer worker bees live only a few weeks. (I'm referring to honeybees here, not other types of bees.)

Winter bees have to live longer because the colony has to "hibernate" through the cold winter months, doing nothing but keeping warm, then in the spring it needs enough bees to reboot the cycle. On the other hand winter bees don't have to forage. Summer bees live less because a) they don't fatten up, b) they fly a lot.

What about bees in places like San Diego where it is mild year round? Do they have permanent spring bees?

It depends as much on weather as on forage availability. If there's no nectar flow during the winter, then they'll just not spend so much effort on foraging, maybe? I'm not sure. Where I am it's hot much of the year, but winters are not a walk in the park for the bees, so they definitely hibernate. (They don't sleep all winter, just they don't go out on cold days, but since it's Texas there are sufficiently warm winter days they will go out on those days, mainly to poop.)

San Diego native here. California bees are incredibly docile and produce honey year-round. They produce more slowly in the winter due to availability but they don't hunker down+expel male drones like in harsher climates.

If you take a California queen to a state like CO they tend to do poorly the first year. They're not used to things like other hives raiding honey stores in winter. It's pretty fascinating!

Interesting! Year-round honey sounds pretty good.

> It is so taxing that the muscles in their wings wear out after around 2 weeks.

Wow. I know a lot about bees (and kept bees with my father for several years), but never thought about this and of course didn't know the details of the wear effect on wings.

I believe (but might be wrong as I’ve read a bunch of books this year on bees - it’s my first year beekeeping!) that the source for this info is this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29499054

Also, if interested, the best book I read this year was recommended on this site and is this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14359367

The thorax/wings have a "stroke" limit, and are not repairable after the final instar (i.e. once they begin flying, nothing gets repaired). It's not just flightmiles, any wing usage rolls the lifetime odometer (e.g. fanning, flying, dancing).

----

Add Dr. Thomas Seely's "Honeybee Democracy" to your reading list.

And may all your honeyflows remain prosperous.

—Two-hive Beeker

My favorite, 1 pound of honey is supposed to require 55k miles of bee flight.

> crops were better - fertilized.

You had my hopes up that I could keep some bees to apply fertilizer to my crops for minute.

Rest assured that workers bees do shit upon your crops.

Occasionally while passing through, perhaps, but being wind pollinated crops you are not exactly going to find swarms of bees in said crops.

40mg nectar might have to be a new band name

I wonder how hard it is to keep your bees from getting "africanized". Sure good if elephants don't spoil your harvest, but you'd like to not get killed tending to it either.

Upon reading the phrase “elephant researcher” I visualise a bespectacled pachyderm in a lab coat.

I love hearing stories like this. Gives me hope.

Whenever I read something about Disney’s Animal Kingdom I tend to feel very happy. Even random facts like this. I’m glad Disney created that place

Was there a followup?

Dr. Soltis?

There is a great TED talk, How bees can keep the peace between elephants and humans

https://www.ted.com/talks/lucy_king_how_bees_can_keep_the_pe...

More than once I had flies flying full speed into my nose and get trapped there! If I was an elephant with a nose bigger than a Henry hover sucking stinging flies I would be scared too!

Yeah - that was my first thought .. A bee sting inside your trunk would be no joke !

Came here to say this. If you had a super long, very sensitive, trunk with a huge bee attracting hole at one end that bees could fly into and then sting inside, you'd be scared of them too .....

I've been stung by a bee inside my mouth (inner lip) as a kid.

I would not recommend.

The actual stinger of bees doesn't hurt that much, it's the venom that really hurts.

I always wondered whether a bee stinger would get deep enough in an elephant's (presumably very thick) dead skin layer to inject venom.

"Of course, a bee’s stinger can’t penetrate the thick hide of an elephant. But when bees swarm—and African bees swarm aggressively—hundreds of bees might sting an elephant in its most sensitive areas, like the trunk, the mouth, and eyes. And it hurts."

But when bees swarm—and African bees swarm aggressively—hundreds of bees might sting an elephant in its most sensitive areas, like the trunk, the mouth, and eyes.

It would be nice if they could form a mutual relationship with honey badgers that don't care how many times they're stung.

Except therein lies the problem, honey badgers don't care about anything.

Except honey?

And larvae. A honey badger will go right into a house of bees to get some larvae. How disgusting is that?! It eats larvae!

It beats flower sperm

Thank you

my grandfather who happily let his cheese age on the countertop until larvae appeared because it improved the taste would not be shocked at all by that.

Is it a personal habit or a local speciality? If the later, any name/recipe will be appreciated.

The cheese itself was a camembert. It doesn't seem to be strictly a personal habit since others from my grandfather's generation (born in 1920s) in the village (small village in Picardie) did the same according to my mother. I've also seen it as a child when I came to visit. The larvae (asticots) look similar to photos of Casgiu merzu from Corsica

I never tried it though. Even though I'm typically open to trying new things and really liked Escamoles in mexico, this was beyond what I could stand to try.

as in a name of a version other than the well known casu martzu?

Mimolette?

Everyone thinks bears like honey, but in reality it is the protein from the larvae they are after. The honey is simply a nice side benefit.

A lot of non-factory honey includes larvae bits anyway, so shrug

Do they not feel the sting or are they immune to the venom?

I think this video (102M views) answers all questions honey badger:

https://youtu.be/4r7wHMg5Yjg

Just a few days ago, a 27-year old elephant died at the St. Louis Zoo when a dog got loose outside his enclosure. The elephant was inside but heard the alarms of the other elephants which caused it to panic and have heart failure.

There’s a brief mention of a study that found that “merely playing recordings of angry bees through speakers in the field was enough to cause the elephants to flee” but it seems like that would be a far cheaper solution than putting actual beehives all over the border.

Unlike loudspeakers, beehives do in fact grow on trees; this may make them cheaper for small farmers in Africa, even if speakers and a suitable power supply may be trivially cheap for us.

Sure it may. But it also saddles them with a bunch of beehives that they have to maintain in perpetuity. It’s cute to think that a “natural” solution like “learn beekeeping” can solve this problem, but that warm and fuzzy feeling is for you, not the farmers in question. Practically speaking, a battery powered speaker is not going to have a higher opportunity cost for these farmers than a beehive.

"Cute"?

If elephants are as smart as we're lead to believe they'll eventually realise its a recording. Like birds do with those fake plastic hawks.

> But it also saddles them with a bunch of beehives that they have to maintain in perpetuity.

Other way round: They'd have to maintain the speaker system, the beehives can maintain themselves.

But the honey produced by loudspeakers is not good.

After months/years of hearing bees but never getting stung or one fly up their noses, p sure the elephants would call the bluff and learn its fake.

Actual beehives though generate honey which can be sold, offsetting the cost.

When being attacked by an elephant, would it help to make bee noises?

And is there a similar trick for dogs?

Yes, but it's hard to teach a dog to make bee noises.

Elephants, and other savannah wildlife, apparently fear humans more than any other predator, so... make human noises?

The elephant's reaction to fear of humans might not be what you expected though? Do they flee humans more often than they charge?

Well, the test involved playing recordings of human voices, lions, hunting sounds, or control sounds at animals gathered at a watering hole and measured their responses.

What they found was that the animals ran from the human sounds much more than the lion sounds; and elephants and rhinos ran particularly fast: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)...

That said, elephants are smart, and have been known to seek out human camps for medical attention when injured: https://www.itv.com/news/2016-06-03/wounded-elephant-shot-by...

The elephants would get wise to that though.

Do elephants ever get anaphylactic shock from bee stings, or have allergy to bee stings (ie a much more severe reaction). Perhaps it's a cargo-cult type learning?

Elephants have very sensitive ears. The buzzing of a hive is what drives them away.

>The buzzing of a hive is what drives them away.

When a hive becomes queenless, it begins humming differently (demonic chords). This sound change is a good indicator (to an observant beekeeper) that it is in chaos and should be left alone. Drives mammals away — the sound is EERIE (think of a cheezy 1920's vampire movie's soundtrack).

For anyone else interested in how each one sounds: https://youtu.be/QDIapC2_Ptg?si=BldfTZuMf3DVnmIn

I know I'm anthropomorphizing the bees, but the queenless hive almost sounds like it's in mourning.

They're fanning their wings to try to spread the [missing] queen's pheromones -- they're searching for their queen. This also serves the purpose of informing the other bees that they don't have a queen. This in turn will cause nurses to look for eggs they can raise queens from by feeding them royal jelly.

"Mourning chords" sounds better, anyways =P

This kind of over dramatizing is tiresome. "Demonic chords" (what's a demonic chord, anyway? Are bees buzzing in a tritone? Are bee hives playing chords?), talking about it sounding like a 1920's vampire movie, etc. Sure makes it sound like nothing in the world could be more creepy.

Then you go and watch a video demonstrating this effect, and it's more like the humming/buzzing sound from the hive is... slower. That's it. It's just slower, lower frequency.

>That's it. It's just slower, lower frequency.

Yes, a good perception (yours).

As a beekeeper, I "feel" these things differently.

It's not that different. If you're doing a split then you can either find the queen and put it in the new hive, or you can just split the hive without looking for the queen then listen to hear which hive is queen-less -- you can hear the difference in that case. But it's not that huge a difference that if you open a hive you can instantly say "oh oh, this one is queen-less".

queenright adjective of a colony of bees : having a queen in the hive.

Not to be confused with Queensrÿche which is a heavy metal band.

Does that mean that you don't actually need to keep bees to drive them away, just replay their sound?

The elephants might learn after a while which sources of sound are genuine. Then you'd have a load of useless loadspeakers and no honey.

Dogs too, apparently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37948121

https://archive.ph/BVhkz

They're just like us

This makes me laugh out loud because a buddy of mine, while I was visiting family in Europe, mentioned there's a song, "how big is the heart in that bumble bee, that he can steer an ox clear out of the shade."

> dry seasons, too, can dampen bee populations in hives as they flee and search for moister climes.

This seems unlikely. The bees likely died. Bees don’t just leave their brood and fly off.

Bees don't just leave their queen and fly off. If there's a queen there's brood but if the queen dies the workers begin to disperse, and also start to lay (haploid) eggs that only hatch into drones which also disperse.

On the other hand, colonies will migrate if their environmental conditions are not ideal. It's a phenomenon called "swarming" and it happens all the time even with domestic livestock.

Is swarming migration? The original colony remains in place (though can fail and die due to starvation, disease etc). The new swarm could be described as migrating, I suppose, but the OG remains.

African bees are super mean and aggressive. I’d be afraid also.

There are something like 2755 species of bees in Africa spread out over the continent. Each individual country probably hosts around 1/3rd of the total species.

So overall don't be too worried about only one species.

Does this apply to Indian elephants and bees? Hope our elephants evolved the same fear, since they are also threatening our crops and towns.

If I had a nose large enough for a bunch of bees to fly up and sting, I would be very interested in avoiding bees too.

Well, the average human nose is at least big enough for two bees to fly up and sting.

The average human is pretty scared of bees.

If you're not wearing appropriate protection then bees can kill you easy.

De minimis you need a) a smoker, b) a veil for your face, head, and neck, c) a long sleeve shirt and long pants both made of fabric they can't easily sting through, and d) preferably tall boots with the pants legs cinched over them so they can't sting your ankles. You need gloves too if you don't know what you're doing. That's if you're beekeeping, but if you're not and you happen upon a beehive you may be in serious trouble.

Bees fly faster than you can run. They fly farther than you can run when panicking from tens of stings. When they give chase they're committed to dying for the colony, so they will sting. So don't approach beehives if you're not prepped for it. Bees will warn you before they attack, unless they're already attacking someone else, in which case they'll just attack you without warning.

All sensible advice.

But if you’re careful you can go without PPE, and I have done so for years. The heat and discomfort of a suit and the additional crushed bees from clumsiness is not for me.

I don’t have Africanised bees, just nice suburban ones.

Normally the bees in the hives used to pollinate blueberries don’t give a damn about me while I’m out doing my agronomy job.

However I’ve found that when there are moving clouds that cause conditions to suddenly shift from shaded to full sun, the abrupt temperature/light increase seems to cause what I presume are guard bees to become upset, resulting in me suddenly getting stung. If the full sun condition is constant then no issues.

I definitely prefer the alfalfa leafcutting bee “hives”, used on alfalfa, they are so much more chill. Technically they are “solitary bees” but are gregarious and happy enough to form a sort of colony close together to others, which allows for having boxes of them. They lack both nest guarding instincts and a venomous stinger. Special bees are used for alfalfa because they don’t mind the alfalfa flowers mechanically slapping them with pollen in their face when opening the flowers. Regular honeybees don’t like that and will learn to chew through the base of the flower to get the nectar.

I would always wear a veil -- doesn't have to be a full suit. Heck, I'd never wear a full suit as that's a recipe for heat stroke here in Texas. But I have a very airy top-half only suit and that's OK. I also wear an ice pack vest during the hot Texas summer months.

And I would always have smoke except when there is a burn ban in effect. Smoke can make all the difference.

I thought you were only at risk if you were allergic?

If you're allergic then one sting can kill you. If you're not allergic then 200 hundred stings can kill you. There can be a quarter million bees in a large colony.

Hundreds, even thousands of stings is a pretty common thing to happen to -for example- tree trimmers who find themselves disturbing a colony in the same tree.

Here's a few examples:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/texas-swar...

https://www.kktv.com/2022/08/31/man-coma-after-stung-by-bees...

https://abcnews.go.com/US/bees-sting-tree-cutting-parks-work...

Even if you're not allergic, a few stings in the wrong place can still kill you, e.g. if your entire neck swells up that it constricts your airways. If you get more than a couple stings to the face or neck I'd recommend you make a dash to the ER and chill out there for a while just in case.

So are humans, I guess it makes sense.

The more you know!

same

My cats have been bitten by various insects more than once and are still not at all "scaredy" around them.

We have three hives in our yard. My dog still gets a kick out of snapping at bees no matter how many times he's stung. He probably gets stung 5-10 times per year while I have only been stung once in 3 years of having the hives in the yard.

My dog is the same way. I thought maybe she was uniquely dumb, but I guess not. She snaps at bees, and once in a while she actually catches one. And judging from her immediate reaction, it isn't too pleasant. But a few minutes later she's snapping at the next one.

My cat has had close calls with various mammals but is never afraid of them.

Buzzed by a bumblebee or fly? He won't go outside the rest of the day.

Screeched at by flocking birds? Hiding under the table, inside.

He likes to eat ants, though.

Ours used to beg to go out so he could watch the carpenter bees every spring.

Then, one year, he put his paw over one that landed near him and was so alarmed by the buzzing fit that he still hasn't gotten over it.

They have a sour/lemony taste. Maybe he likes that. Don't ask me how I know.

Cats got attitude.

cattitude

I bet any kid across the world would be able to guess the result of Dominique's theories about bees and elephants .

"Mom, that lady at the party today, doesn't she already know the answer? Does she really get paid for that?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com