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Why are elephants afraid of small bees?

Imagine a giant African elephant. It weighs as much as six cars combined — about 6 tons! Its trunk has 40,000 muscles (you only have 600 in your entire body). It can knock down a tree with one push. And then this giant suddenly starts running away, trumpeting anxiously across the savannah. From whom? From a tiny bee that weighs a billion times less than it!

Scientists from Oxford couldn't believe their ears for a long time. They recorded the buzzing of a swarm of bees and played it to wild elephants through a speaker. Within seconds, the entire herd — moms, dads, and babies — ran away! The elephants also started shaking their heads and kicking up clouds of dust with their trunks to scare away the imaginary bees.

Why is the giant afraid of insects? It turned out that bees can painfully bite an elephant in the most delicate places - behind the trunk, near the eyes, inside the ears. And the elephant doesn't even have time to chase them away! That's why baby elephants learn from early childhood: if you hear a buzzing sound, run away.

But the most amazing thing is yet to come. Elephants have a fantastic memory - they recognize their friends after 20 years of separation! An old female elephant remembers every water source within a radius of hundreds of kilometers. And this memory saves them: one bee sting - the elephant will remember the sound forever.

And people have used it for good. In Kenya, farmers hang beehives with bees on their fences. Elephants avoid the fields - and no one needs to be scared or shot. Nature has resolved the dispute itself.