Being a Star Wars fan, I had to include this, because of the title of the article.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/06/tusken-raiders-repelled-by-afr.html
June 4, 2009 12:41 PM
Rowan Hooper, online news editor
African farmers hope to stop "Genghis Khan" raiding their villages by enlisting the services of bees.
A notorious bull elephant named after the Mongolian warlord has been tracked by GPS leading crop raids in Kenya.
Since elephants are known to buzz off at the mere sound of bees, Lucy King of the University of Oxford designed a fence made of beehives to deter rampaging elephants. 'We designed the beehive fence as an affordable and practical way to create a barrier that the elephants would be afraid to cross,' she says.
A pilot study in the African Journal of Ecology showed that a farm protected by a beehive fence had 86% fewer successful crops raids than a 'control' farm without such a fence.
"Our beehive fence design has been shown to be robust enough to survive elephant raids and cheap enough for farmers to construct themselves," says King, "especially as it also gives protection against cattle rustlers and, when occupied by colonies of African honeybees, will give the farmers two or three honey harvests a year that they can sell to offset the cost of building the fence."
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