BENGALURU:An innovative method of keeping elephant herds from entering farms on the fringes of Bengaluru, has the farm owners in a spot. While the beehive boxes and the bees do help in staving off jumbo herds, they are, on the other hand, attracting hordes of sloth bears who destroys the beehive boxes, only to clear the way for elephants to return.
Farmhouse owners near Bengaluru are truly stuck — while armed with the bees and their hives — between the elephants and the bears. Laxminarayan Srinivasaiah, owner of 20-acre Bettada Budadha Thota, a community farm near Sathanur village in Bengaluru rural district, kept five beehive boxes on his 20-acre farm to keep away jumbo herds who often stray into his farm and destroy crops. But now he is facing a problem. “We tried using the bee hive boxes but that did not work as sloth bears destroyed them. Of course, we cannot blame them as we are encroaching their forest land,” says Srinivasaiah.
His experience was shared by Rajendra Hegde, a community farmer also in Sathanur, who also used honey bee boxes. “This is a good technique if you have kept many such boxes around the farm. For a one acre farm, three to four bee hives boxes are necessary. However, as we know, for bears, honey is a weakness. They come and destroy the boxes and eat the honey up. And there are bee-eating birds as well,” he says.
Raghavendra Bhat, manager of a 25-acre partnership farm called Chiguru in Therubeedi Village, Kanakapura Taluk, says, “I have not used the bee hive boxes yet. I understand that elephants get irritated when bees enter their trunk and ears. But apart from the sloth bears who get attracted by these, I also fear that the bees might attack our cows, goats and sheep when disturbed by the elephants.”
Dhanu Kumar, owner of seven-acre Shodhan Farms in Kanchanahalli near Kanakapura, has elephants straying into his farm during summers in searcof paddy, ragi, mangoes, and water. He used the beehive boxes but “Unfortunately, sloth bears destroyed my bee boxes. Now I use multiple tactics including, stray dogs at specific entry and exit points, wind chimes made of beer bottles, bonfires, a chain of CDs and DVDs off which solar powered flashlights reflect bright light, chilli plants, ponds with ducks and fishes that make the water stink, to keep elephants away.”
Forest department has been encouraging the farmhouse owners, the railways as well as those living in elephant corridors across the state to use bees and beehive boxes to repel elephant herds.
Research studies in South Africa showed how elephants are repelled by bees and how this can be effectively used to keep them away from railway tracks and agriculture fields. The studies showed that pachyderms reacted adversely to ‘pheromones’ produced by the bees and forced them to turn away.