Birds
Greater Honeyguide
Indicator indicator · also called greater honeyguide, honeyguide, black-throated honeyguide
The greater honeyguide is a plain little African bird with a remarkable job: it finds wild bees’ nests and leads people to them, chattering and flitting ahead tree by tree. The humans take the honey; the bird gets the wax comb and the grubs. It is one of the only wild animals that genuinely cooperates with us.
Overview
Greater honeyguides live in woodland, savanna, and bush across most of sub-Saharan Africa, wherever there are wild honeybees and hole-nesting host birds. They are about 20 cm, drab, the male with a black throat and white outer tail feathers flashed while guiding. They are among the only birds that can digest beeswax, helped by gut bacteria.
Guiding
A honeyguide approaches a person with a loud chattering call, flies ahead to a perch, waits, and repeats — leading toward a bee colony that may be over a kilometre away. The Yao honey-hunters of Mozambique use a specific “brrr-hm” call that roughly triples the chance of being guided and finding a nest; field experiments confirm the bird responds to it.
Why it guides
The bird eats wax and bee brood but cannot break into a defended colony alone. A human (or perhaps once a honey badger) opens the nest and drives off the bees, and the honeyguide feeds on the leftover comb.
A cuckoo too
The greater honeyguide is a brood parasite — the female lays in other birds’ burrow nests, and the chick uses hooks on its bill to kill the host’s young.
Status
The greater honeyguide is Least Concern and fairly common, though the guiding behaviour is fading where people no longer harvest wild honey.
Greater Honeyguide: common questions
Does the honeyguide really lead people to honey?
Yes, and it is one of the best-documented cases of cooperation between a wild animal and humans anywhere. A greater honeyguide will approach a person, give a distinctive chattering call, flit to a nearby perch in the direction of a bees' nest, wait for the person to follow, then move on, repeating this for anything from a few dozen metres to more than a kilometre, and finally perch quietly and change its call near the nest. Human honey-hunters open the nest, usually smoking the bees, and take the honey, leaving the wax comb and bee brood exposed for the bird. Field experiments have confirmed the bird responds to specific human recruitment sounds and that following a honeyguide substantially increases a hunter's success rate.
Why does the honeyguide want people to open the nest?
Because it eats beeswax, and it usually cannot get at the comb inside a live, defended colony on its own. Wax is an unusual food that few animals can digest; the honeyguide can, with the help of specialised gut microbes, and wax and bee brood are central to its diet. A wild bees' nest is typically in a tree cavity or rock crevice, guarded by stinging bees, and while a honeyguide can take small amounts of exposed wax, a whole colony is beyond it. A human (or historically perhaps a honey badger) can break the nest open and drive off the bees, after which the honeyguide feeds freely on the leftover comb. So the bird provides the location and the human provides the muscle, and both get food.
Do honeyguides and honey badgers work together?
This is the popular story, and it appears in many nature documentaries, but the evidence is surprisingly weak. There are a small number of anecdotal reports and one piece of much-questioned film footage of a honeyguide apparently leading a honey badger, but no solid, repeatable scientific observations of the behaviour in the wild, and some researchers who have spent years watching both animals have never seen it. The honeyguide's guiding of humans, by contrast, is thoroughly verified. It is plausible that honeyguides guide, or once guided, badgers or baboons, and the behaviour probably did not evolve just for people, but the badger partnership specifically remains unproven.
Is the honeyguide a brood parasite like a cuckoo?
Yes. The greater honeyguide never builds a nest or raises its own young. The female lays her eggs in the underground or tree-cavity nests of other birds, especially bee-eaters, barbets, kingfishers, woodpeckers, and starlings, often puncturing the host's own eggs when she visits. The honeyguide chick hatches quickly and is equipped with sharp hooks on the tips of its bill, which it uses to bite and kill the host's newly hatched chicks or puncture their eggs, so that it monopolises the food the host parents bring. The hooks are lost as the chick grows. The unwitting foster parents raise the young honeyguide as their own.