Hacker News Reader

Comment by alehlopeh | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com