African elephants run from the sound of disturbed bees
Summary Encroaching human development into former wildlife areas [1] is compressing African elephants into ever smaller home ranges, causing increased levels of human–elephant conflict [2]. African honeybees have been proposed as a possible deterrent to elephants [3]. We have performed a sound playback experiment to study this hypothesis. We found that a significant majority of elephants, in a sample of 18 well-known families and subgroups of varying sizes, reacted negatively — immediately walking or running away — when they heard the buzz of disturbed bees, while they ignored the control sound of natural white-noise. Whether the observed response was the result of individual conditioning or of learning by social facilitation remains to be established. Our study strongly supports the hypothesis that bees — and perhaps even their buzz alone — may be deployed to keep elephants at bay.
This article deals with the phenomenon of crime as experienced by farmers in various farms in the area of "Transvaal Sugar Limited". The empirical-phenomenological method was utilised and the following five steps were employed: reduced transcriptions, summarising the main points of the case, illustrated condensation of the case, description of the psychological structure of the case and essential structure of interviews in all the cases. The essential structure of farmers' experiences of farm crimes identified five areas which addressed the experience of crime as a theme namely anticipation of levels of service delivery by the SAPS, reaction arising from frustration at poor service delivery, crime prevention as an extension of the previous area, effect of crime on quality of life and mutual trust and loyalty between farmers and farmworkers.