Hezron Nzumu

Hezron Nzumu farms on the periphery of a wildlife conservation area in rural Kenya. Many months of growing crops has often resulted in no harvest at all, for one reason - elephants. There are many elephants in the region who routinely pass through farmland on their migratory routes. When they come across a field of ripe nutritious crops they are very partial to eating through the entire field leaving nothing but stems and bare land in their wake. An elephant can eat up to half a ton of food a day so a whole herd makes short work of a small farmer's field. Hezron and his family have desperately tried to protect his fields from elephants. This requires being on constant watch duty with husband and wife on rotation through the night. Fires, noise, projectiles and fencing both electric and metal fail to effectively prevent these enormous animals from feeding themselves with the crops grown by these families. Until now...

Hezron constructed beehives attached hanging from poles in the ground and placed them 10m apart in a circle around his field. Each beehive is attached to the beehives either side of it in the circle with a wire so that if the wire is disturbed it rocks all the beehives. He then seeks wild bees nests in the local area and takes the honey for harvest under the protection of smoke. These wild bees leave their nests and migrate to the beehives on Hezron's farm. Once the hives are populated with bees the ring of interconnected beehives surrounding the field protect it like a bee forcefield. When an elephant next attempts to enter the farmland they knock the wires, rocking the beehives and sending the bees into swarm. The bees attack the elephant and the elephant runs off in alarm!

Although an elephant's skin is several centimetres thick, bees pose them a serious threat. Bees tend to aim for the wettest parts of their target and in an elephants case this is the trunk. One can imagine bees getting inside an elephants trunk to be mightily uncomfortable for the elephant! But it can risk their lives too. A scent is left by the bees on the location they have stung attracting more bees to attack the same area. Multiple stings to a single trunk risks swelling that could restrict the breathing and drinking of the elephant. Elephants are so scared of bees that Dr Lucy King of Oxford University has demonstrated that an entire herd of elephants will almost always disperse merely at the sound of bees.

The stone age painting below from Ebusingata, Kwa-Zulu Natal seems to teach of this relationship between bees and elephants. Was such stone age art used to teach people about the relationships in nature? To help people to live, survive and thrive on this planet? Had the knowledge about the relationship between bees and elephants been lost for many generations?

Understanding

The use of bees to protect crops and simultaneously produce honey instead of attacking and killing the elephants is one of many examples from across the world where human understanding of relationships between living things is enabling us to create more abundance.

The conventional approach to agriculture in the industrialised world is to create a blank slate and attempt to grown crops under conditions idealised from the model of the laboratory: using chemicals and heavy machinery to remove all living things from a field besides the crop one intends to grow, feeding these crops with nutrients in the form of chemicals, killing all potential predators, pathogens and plant competition using more chemicals, preserve the foods with a further set of chemicals and then transport the food hundreds or thousands of miles using oil. This approach to agriculture breaks down most of the biological relationships that have been part of the ecology on land since life began. Agroecology is demonstrating that this approach is not only destructive but also less productive than farming that mimics nature.

In some parts of the world aphids rather the elephants are a major threat to crops. In some places such as the Netherlands, chemical insecticides are giving way to biological controls of insects. Predators such as ladybirds are bred in large numbers or attracted to fields to feast on the animals such as aphids that can damage crop yields. Scientists and farmers across the world are developing systems like these that make use of natural relationships to create abundance rather than destruction and place us on the planet as a keystone species.

How can we spread their teaching about our relationships with nature?