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.
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.
