Living with elephants — the trailblazing beekeeping women who are championing coexistence

Elephants in the Selous Game Reserve, Tanzania

Today (12 August) is World Elephant Day and, to help mark the occasion, we’re delighted to be able to share this fascinating guest blog …

“If we find elephants in the corridor we run away, returning home without any firewood, even coming up against hyenas and snakes on the way,” shares Neema Stephens.

Walking along the forested boundary of the Upper Kitete elephant corridor in Tanzania, Neema joins her fellow beekeepers, 36 women who formed the NARI Women’s Beekeeping Group in 2020, named in their Iraq dialect after the acacia tree they gathered beneath for meetings.

The ladies know this corridor well. Like the elephants, who have historical maps of the landscape imprinted into their memories, the NARI Women Beekeepers can trace every rocky track and tree cluster. Their knowledge of the environment is unparalleled.

This habitat provides essential resources for a vast diversity of wildlife and the community, including water and firewood. Women such as Neema collect these resources almost daily, navigating challenging terrain and potentially dangerous encounters with elephants.

Two bull elephants in the Ngorongoro Crater (c) Francesca Mahoney / Wild Survivors

Upper Kitete is one of the last remaining elephant corridors in northern Tanzania, crucial for the movement of approximately 1,000 elephants from across the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to the Manyara valley below. Matriarchal herds and their young traverse the steep escarpment nightly, carving a well-trodden path through the trees and volcanic boulders, seeking the rich foraging range of the forest and natural minerals from a salt lake before returning by dawn.

But their movements have become increasingly restricted. Elephants across Tanzania are facing greater isolation due to urbanisation and infrastructure development, fragmenting their migratory corridors and posing great risks to their long-term survival. Upper Kitete is a critical lifeline for both women and elephants.

The NARI Women’s Beekeepers are now leading a successful enterprise that protects the corridor and reduces conflict with their neighbours.

Encasing the corridor is a patchwork of farms. For generations, elephants have entered the farms, causing immense damage and exacerbating food insecurity and livelihood loss for the rural community. Crop-raiding is a form of human-elephant conflict, which today is one of the greatest threats facing elephants, resulting in fatalities on both sides.

This issue has historically contributed to the poaching of elephants for their ivory. In 2015, at the height of the poaching epidemic, I met farmers around the Selous facing enormous pressures from livelihood loss caused by elephants. Poaching gangs targeted and recruited these farmers, exploiting their financial fears by luring them to be trackers in missions to kill elephants.

Preventing this dangerous coercion and threat to elephants through conflict resolution became the motivation for Wild Survivors’ formation in 2016.

To counteract conflict, we introduced a beehive fence project, proven to deter elephants by taking advantage of their fear of bees. The farmer-managed solution in Upper Kitete now stretches 5.25 km, achieving a 70 per cent reduction in elephant farm visits — and key to this strategy is the women’s beekeeping enterprise.

In addition to their apiary generating income from the rich forest honey, we introduced a honey spot market arrangement. Neema and her colleagues purchase raw honey from farmers along the beehive fence, process it and sell the high-quality ‘Never Forget Honey’ product to safari lodges in Ngorongoro and the Serengeti. The profits buy seeds for their permaculture garden, supplying organic vegetables to the community.

Recently, the women’s hub introduced a savings and loans facility, supporting hundreds of women with affordable loans for business ventures, school fees or household needs. Not stopping there, each of the 36 women trains three others each year in beekeeping and kitchen gardens, with Wild Survivors’ donors supplying the beehives, tools and training courses.

This sustainable community-led livelihood promotes forest protection and drives financial independence for the trailblazing women.

There is a unique symmetry between the matriarchal elephant, bee and women-empowered societies. Their care for the environment and wildlife coexistence extends nutritional and financial support to families across the region. The elephants thrive in the Highland Forest and Corridor and, under greater protection, forest cover increases, providing forage for millions of bees, boosting biodiversity and crop production.

Farmers enjoy increased crops and income, exploring climate-resilient agriculture techniques with Wild Survivors, which has fast become a pressing priority to achieve sustainable land use and habitat restoration.

Reflecting on the wisdom of elephant matriarchs and the unity of bee colonies, fellow NARI member Fabiola explains: “As women, we make up a big part in society. When we are empowered, we discover who we are as an important influential group. That is why if you educate a woman, you educate all of society.”

Wild Survivors respond to the most pressing issues affecting elephants, people and habitats in Tanzania, with a particular focus on preventing human-elephant conflict, by delivering sustainable initiatives which place community welfare at the heart of wildlife conservation. The team does so by helping recover lost corridors and creating essential route connectivity for elephants, with local communities at the fore. Its community Bee Guardians support farmers to install and manage elephant-deterring beehive fences, communities become entrepreneurs in forest-friendly livelihoods and a new women’s beekeeping collective is producing honey and wax and promoting healthy soils and coexistence farming at their permaculture garden. Since 2018, when the beehive fence was first installed, elephant crop-raiding has decreased by 70 per cent, while farming profit has increased by more than 300 per cent, in addition to 36 trailblazing women leading the way with corridor protection through sustainable beekeeping livelihoods in the Ngorongoro ecosystem where Wild Survivors’ projects began.