You might think a 10 ton elephant wouldn’t give a second thought to a tiny bee. You’d be wrong. To the glee of headline writers, researchers from Kenya and the UK have found that playing the sound of angry bees to African elephants makes them scarper, and fast.

“We weren’t surprised that they responded to the threatening sound of disturbed bees, as elephants are intelligent animals that are intimately aware of their surroundings, but we were surprised at how quickly they responded to the sounds by running away. Almost half of our study herds started to move away within 10 seconds of the bee playback,” said Lucy King of the University of Oxford (press release).

All this has triggered a slew of stories including riffs on how it’s not really mice elephants are afraid of, ‘buzzing off’, and a pun almost as bad as my headline about the ‘fright of the humble bee’ (Daily Mail, BBC, Guardian respectively).

There is a serious side to this though. In the latest issue of the Current Biology journal King an colleagues propose that the noise of bees could be used to deter elephants from areas where they will come into conflict with humans. This could be hugely important for the cowardly animals’ conservation.

Image: Punch Stock