Why nature has a perplexing way of providing simple solutions to complex problems

Elephants moving along the corridor beneath the Meru-Nanyuki highway. The over 50km long tunnel has reduced human-wildlife conflict. [File, Standard]

Herds of elephants have been straying onto my inch of earth in Laikipia to harvest where they didn’t sow.

They do it literally, by uprooting potatoes and chopping off cobs of maize with surgical precision.

No, I don’t own a ranch, I never will. That’s the wisdom you gain from literature. You can’t read Leo Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need and still suffer one more sleepless night fretting about material things.

But that doesn’t mean I was going to feed the pachyderms for the rest of my life. It was only fair that the big ranchers feed their herds.

Wiring the place with an electric fence was one the proposed ways, but that was way too expensive to guard the few gorogoro of waru I hoped to harvest.

It was during that exploration of cost-benefit analysis that I learned that bees are elephants are sworn enemies. One doesn’t get close to the other, as we have seen some politicians here do occasionally.

So I secured a traditional hive from Makueni, from an indigenous tree species that’s reputed to have natural scents to attract bees. We waited a few weeks. Wapi. In the second month, we invited an old man who said hives have to be treated using certain herbs. He lit a fire and let the scents engulf inside and outside the hive.

Within days, the bees arrived, happily buzzing around. But they did not come alone. They brought with them a whole ecosystem: by pollinating the plants around them, insects now abound, as do the birds that feed off the insects. And the scent from the honey combs has attracted even more insects.

Consequently, the forlorn acacia tree that stood silent all its lifetime is now garlanded by countless bird nests, whose dwellers perform a philharmonic orchestra from light to dusk. All this while, the bees are busy making honey, while still keeping the elephants at bay.

These are the marvels of nature that I simply can’t get enough of, and my constant conflict now is how I’d get to enjoy this more often, for it stills the mind and heals the soul.