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Previous research into natural deterrents showed that elephants avoided African honey bees.

In 2009, experts from the University of Oxford, UK, and the charity Save the Elephants set up a trial project to test whether beehives could prevent conflict on farmland boundaries.

After two years of observations, the full results of the trial have now been published in the African Journal of Ecology.

“Finding a way to use live beehives was the next logical step in finding a socially and ecologically sensitive way of taking advantage of elephants’ natural avoidance behaviour to bees to protect farmers’ crops,” said Dr Lucy King, the University of Oxford biologist who led the study.

“It was very exciting to see that our theoretical work has been converted into a practical application,” she said.

Genetically identical forest trees raised in different environments react differently when exposed to drought conditions, a study has shown.

The authors have said it is the first scientific critique of the “nursery effect”, in which trees develop certain profiles based on where they are grown.

The team took the same varieties of trees from different areas and measured how their responses to drought varied.

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The nursery effect is something that had been noted in an anecdotal fashion by foresters and gardeners,” explained co-author Malcolm Campbell from the University of Toronto.

The team found that it had not be reported or documented in any detail within scientific journals, yet it was a concept that was being widely used.

Out in the field, biologists have noted that organisms are more likely to reproduce sexually when there are more parasites loping around in their vicinity.

What has been missing is a direct manipulation to organisms’ sex lives to test if it makes them more or less resistant to parasites.

Direct evidence

Now researchers working at the University of Indiana in the US have used the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans to do just this.

The team engineered two types of worms – some that could only reproduce by having sex, and some that could only clone themselves.

Bacterial cells infect the crushing mouth parts of the worm and kill it

The researchers watched the worms gorge themselves on a lawn of a nasty bacterium, Serratia marcescens, which invades the worms’ guts and from there multiplies into every crevice of their body, killing the worms from the inside.

Across five different populations, worms that reproduced sexually faired well over the 20 generations, while all animals that cloned themselves died quickly.

Scientists in Australia have found the skeleton of a “giant wombat” which lived some two million years ago.

The plant-eating marsupial would have been the size of a four-wheel drive car and weighed three tonnes, experts say.

Its bones were found on a farm in north-eastern Australia’s Queensland state.

The find is one of Australia’s most significant pre-historic discoveries ever because the skeleton is complete, experts say.

It is the first time a complete skeleton of a Diprotodon optatum has been uncovered.

The animal was widespread across Australia about 50,000 years ago, when it is believed the first indigenous people lived.