Anyone having gone away with Quest between 2000 and 2006 will probably remember Lucy King. She helped to set up the entire Quest Africa operations and brought some much needed sanity to the until then all male office!
She has now moved onto academia, and has been spending the past few years doing a PhD at Oxford Uni, studying the relationship between elephants and bees! Believe it or not, there is one, in that elephants are scared of them, so Lucy has been working out how best to take advantage of this situation by using bee hives to prevent elephants from entering farmers’ plantations and destroying their crops (previously when this happened, farmers would often just shoot the elephants to protect their livelihoods).
Her latest paper has made a bit of a breakthrough. During her studies out in the Samburu National Park in Kenya, she has observed that, when elephants hear the buzz of bees, they actually communicate to other elephants about the danger. This sort of communication has previously mainly been seen in mammal species, so quite a revelation!