Скачать или смотреть Tamboti Tales - Elephants vs Bees - Tamboti Bush Lodge - Dinokeng Reserve - Gauteng - South Africa

Tamboti Elephants - Tamboti Bush Lodge
Derrick Cochran
Tamboti Bush Lodge
Derrick and Pixie Cochran
Dinokeng Game Reserve
Tel: 012 711 0909
Mobiles : 082 8211 571 / 078 459 1697
Email : [email protected]



The bulls wrecked quite a number of fences in the area and invaded a number of gardens and this got quite bad during the winter and for many months we at Tamboti Bush Lodge felt that we were being ignored because we had a very good electric fence and we also had no dogs to irritate them, but this was not to last, eventually the bulls decided that the citrus orchard and the rose bushes inside the fences looked far too good to ignore and they started trampling down our fences and invading the lodge. This resulted in quite a few adventures with the elephants and has created plenty of stories that I have included here. We eventually had a special fence erected at the lodge that consists of 5 spring-loaded live electric wires on the outside of the fence with a strong energiser and this seems to have resolved the problem. This makes it very difficult for the elephants to get at the main fence and pull them down as they just keep getting shocked as the wires stretch with the springs and they cannot break them very easily.
Another option that landowners in the game reserve to keep the elephants away from their assets are bees. We are very fortunate to have a master bee keeper in the game reserve, namely Anton Scheler. Anton is German and highly skilled in bee keeping and travels the SADEC countries lecturing and training prospective bee farmers in all the skills of profitable bee keeping. While working in the Caprivi in Namibia Anton found farmers using a unique method of protecting their crops from the elephants. They would have beehives every 10-20 meters around their fields connected with pieces of rope. When the elephants raided their crops they would push through the rope and pull the beehives over. This resulted in the bees attacking the elephants and driving them away. The big problem with this method was that the farmers were too scared to put the beehives full of angry bees back on their stands. They found after this that it was easier to plant chillies around their fields or alternatively hang cotton sacks soaked in chillies on a single wire around their fields as the elephants were very averse to the chillies.
Anton has a lodge very appropriately called Honey Lodge in the reserve. His borehole for the water supply to the lodge is about 800 meters from the lodge and he had an issue with the elephants pushing over his tanks to get water or taking the tank covers off the tanks. He then placed a number of beehives on stands around the tank. On a day the matriarchal herd was visiting the area and one of the cows decided to investigate the tank looking for water. She approached the tank and the beehives very cautiously but probably got a little scared as she approached the beehives and she started flapping her ears. Big mistake! This ear flapping may intimidate humans, cars and other large animals but not a bee, This annoyed the bees big time and the swarm attacked her and a number of the other elephants that were with her. They bulleted away screaming like a bunch of babies. The elephants now give the borehole and water tanks a very wide berth.
Anton also had a very amazing experience with the elephants when he was checking the borehole. As he approached the borehole one of the elephants had pushed over a tree. The tree had landed across the road preventing Anton from reaching the borehole, he was really annoyed, but the elephant was standing right behind the tree, so Anton backed off about twenty meters from the tree and got out of his car and pointing at the tree asked the elephant how he was expected to get to the borehole with the tree in the way. The elephant looked at Anton very calmly and then surprise, surprise lifted the tree pulled it one side of the road and just walked away, Anton was totally blown away and he stood there for quite a while trying to figure out what had really happened.
Anton has also placed beehives at another landowner’s property who had a major problem with the bees constantly pulling his borehole pipes apart and even pulling his cables out. Since the beehives have been there the problem has stopped. We often see on TV adverts with elephants gently picking marula’s off the trees to eat. This is definitely not reality, as most times they are very destructive and will break huge branches off the trees to get to the fruit. To save the marula trees in the reserve Anton has also placed many beehives under the marula trees and as long as the hives have bee colonies in them the trees are safe from the marauding elephants, because you cannot fool an elephant, an empty beehive will just be ignored.

I have quite a number of wonderful and sometimes scary times with the elephants in the Dinokeng Game Reserve and I am sure that I will have many more in years to come.