Greater Honeyguide
Encyclopedia
The Greater Honeyguide is a bird
in the family Indicatoridae
, paleotropical near passerine
bird
s related to the woodpecker
s. Its English
and scientific names refer to its habit of guiding people to bee colonies.
The Greater Honeyguide is a resident breeder in sub-Saharan Africa
. It is found in a variety of habitats
that have trees, especially dry open woodland, but not in the West African jungle.
n honeyguides, it has bold white patches on the sides of the tail. The male has dark grey-brown upperparts and white underparts, with a black throat. The wings are streaked whitish, and there is a yellow shoulder patch. The bill is pink.
The female is duller and lacks the black throat. Her bill is blackish. Immature birds are very distinctive, having olive-brown upperparts with a white rump and yellow throat and upper breast.
eggs
, larva
e and pupa
e; waxworm
s; and beeswax
. (Honeyguides are among the few birds that can digest wax.) It frequently associates with other honeyguides at hives; immatures dominate adults, and immatures of this species dominate all others. Like other honeyguides, the Greater Honeyguide enters hives while the bees are torpid in the early morning, feeds at abandoned hives (African bees desert more often than those of the temperate zones), and scavenges at hives robbed by people or other large animals, notably the Ratel
or honey badger. Most remarkably, it also guides people to hives (Isack & Reyer 1989).
Guiding is unpredictable and is more common among immatures and females than adult males. A guiding bird attracts a person's attention with wavering, chattering "'tya' notes compounded with peeps or pipes" (Short and Horne 2002a), sounds it also gives in aggression. The guiding bird flies toward an occupied hive (Greater Honeyguides know the sites of many hives in their territories) and then stops and calls again. As in other situations, it spreads its tail, showing the white spots, and has a "bounding, upward flight to a perch", which make it conspicuous. If the followers are native honey
-hunters, when they reach the hive they incapacitate the adult bees with smoke and open the hive with axes or pangas (machete
s). After they take the honey, the honeyguide eats whatever is left (Short, Horne, and Diamond 2003.
One study found that use of honeyguides by the Boran people of East Africa reduces their search time for honey by approximately two-thirds. Because of this benefit, the Boran use a specific loud whistle, known as the fuulido, when a search for honey is about to begin. The fuulido doubles the encounter rate with honeyguides (Isack and Reyer 1989).
The tradition of the Bushmen
and most other tribes says that the honeyguide must be thanked with a gift of honey; if not, it may lead its follower to a lion
, bull elephant
, or venomous snake
as punishment. However, "others maintain that honeycomb spoils the bird, and leave it to find its own bits of comb" (Short, Horne, and Diamond 2003).
, Estes (1999), and Zimmerman, Turner, and Pearson (1999), say that this species also guides Honey Badgers (ratels). Friedmann (1955, quoted by Harper) notes that Sparrman
said in the 18th century that indigenous Africans reported this interaction, but Friedmann adds that no biologist has seen it. According to Dean and MacDonald (1981), Friedmann does quote reports that Greater Honeyguides guide baboon
s and speculates that the behavior evolved
in relation to these species before the appearance of humanity. However, they state,
Dean and MacDonald go on to express doubt that honeyguides guide other animals and suggest that the behavior may have evolved with "early man". Short and Horne (2002b) agree, noting that bee colonies are seasonally very common in Africa and Ratels probably have no trouble finding them.
Another argument against guiding of non-human animals is that near cities, where Africans increasingly buy sugar
rather than hunting for wild honey, guiding behavior is disappearing. Ultimately it may disappear everywhere (Short, Horne, and Diamond 2003).
s. It sometimes follows mammals or birds to catch the insects they flush, and joins mixed-species flocks
in ones and twos. It has been known to eat the eggs of small birds.
. It lays white eggs in series of 3 to 7, for a total of 10 to 20 in a year. Each egg is laid in a different nest of a bird of another species, including some woodpeckers, barbet
s, kingfisher
s, bee-eater
s, woodhoopoe
s, starling
s, and large swallows. All the species parasitized nest in holes, covered nests, or deep cup nests. The chick has a membranous hook on the bill that it uses, while still blind and featherless, to kill the host's young outright or by repeated wounds.
Bird
Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...
in the family Indicatoridae
Honeyguide
Honeyguides are near passerine bird species of the order Piciformes. They are also known as indicator birds, or honey birds, although the latter term is also used more narrowly to refer to species of the genus Prodotiscus. They have an Old World tropical distribution, with the greatest number of...
, paleotropical near passerine
Near passerine
Near passerine or higher land-bird assemblage are terms often given to arboreal birds or those most often believed to be related to the true passerines due to ecological similarities; the group corresponds to some extent with the Anomalogonatae of Garrod All near passerines are land birds...
bird
Bird
Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...
s related to the woodpecker
Woodpecker
Woodpeckers are near passerine birds of the order Piciformes. They are one subfamily in the family Picidae, which also includes the piculets and wrynecks. They are found worldwide and include about 180 species....
s. Its English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and scientific names refer to its habit of guiding people to bee colonies.
The Greater Honeyguide is a resident breeder in sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa as a geographical term refers to the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara. A political definition of Sub-Saharan Africa, instead, covers all African countries which are fully or partially located south of the Sahara...
. It is found in a variety of habitats
Habitat (ecology)
A habitat is an ecological or environmental area that is inhabited by a particular species of animal, plant or other type of organism...
that have trees, especially dry open woodland, but not in the West African jungle.
Description
The Greater Honeyguide is about 20 cm long and weighs about 50 g. Like all AfricaAfrica
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
n honeyguides, it has bold white patches on the sides of the tail. The male has dark grey-brown upperparts and white underparts, with a black throat. The wings are streaked whitish, and there is a yellow shoulder patch. The bill is pink.
The female is duller and lacks the black throat. Her bill is blackish. Immature birds are very distinctive, having olive-brown upperparts with a white rump and yellow throat and upper breast.
Bee colonies
The Greater Honeyguide feeds primarily on the contents of bee colonies ("hives"): beeBee
Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants, and are known for their role in pollination and for producing honey and beeswax. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea, presently classified by the unranked taxon name Anthophila...
eggs
Egg (biology)
An egg is an organic vessel in which an embryo first begins to develop. In most birds, reptiles, insects, molluscs, fish, and monotremes, an egg is the zygote, resulting from fertilization of the ovum, which is expelled from the body and permitted to develop outside the body until the developing...
, larva
Larva
A larva is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into adults. Animals with indirect development such as insects, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a larval phase of their life cycle...
e and pupa
Pupa
A pupa is the life stage of some insects undergoing transformation. The pupal stage is found only in holometabolous insects, those that undergo a complete metamorphosis, going through four life stages; embryo, larva, pupa and imago...
e; waxworm
Waxworm
Waxworms are the caterpillar larvae of wax moths, which belong to the snout moth family . Two closely related species are commercially bred – the lesser wax moth and the greater wax moth...
s; and beeswax
Beeswax
Beeswax is a natural wax produced in the bee hive of honey bees of the genus Apis. It is mainly esters of fatty acids and various long chain alcohols...
. (Honeyguides are among the few birds that can digest wax.) It frequently associates with other honeyguides at hives; immatures dominate adults, and immatures of this species dominate all others. Like other honeyguides, the Greater Honeyguide enters hives while the bees are torpid in the early morning, feeds at abandoned hives (African bees desert more often than those of the temperate zones), and scavenges at hives robbed by people or other large animals, notably the Ratel
Ratel
The honey badger , also known as the ratel, is a species of mustelid native to Africa, the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. Despite its name, the honey badger does not closely resemble other badger species, instead bearing more anatomical similarities to weasels...
or honey badger. Most remarkably, it also guides people to hives (Isack & Reyer 1989).
Guiding is unpredictable and is more common among immatures and females than adult males. A guiding bird attracts a person's attention with wavering, chattering "'tya' notes compounded with peeps or pipes" (Short and Horne 2002a), sounds it also gives in aggression. The guiding bird flies toward an occupied hive (Greater Honeyguides know the sites of many hives in their territories) and then stops and calls again. As in other situations, it spreads its tail, showing the white spots, and has a "bounding, upward flight to a perch", which make it conspicuous. If the followers are native honey
Honey
Honey is a sweet food made by bees using nectar from flowers. The variety produced by honey bees is the one most commonly referred to and is the type of honey collected by beekeepers and consumed by humans...
-hunters, when they reach the hive they incapacitate the adult bees with smoke and open the hive with axes or pangas (machete
Machete
The machete is a large cleaver-like cutting tool. The blade is typically long and usually under thick. In the English language, an equivalent term is matchet, though it is less commonly known...
s). After they take the honey, the honeyguide eats whatever is left (Short, Horne, and Diamond 2003.
One study found that use of honeyguides by the Boran people of East Africa reduces their search time for honey by approximately two-thirds. Because of this benefit, the Boran use a specific loud whistle, known as the fuulido, when a search for honey is about to begin. The fuulido doubles the encounter rate with honeyguides (Isack and Reyer 1989).
The tradition of the Bushmen
Bushmen
The indigenous people of Southern Africa, whose territory spans most areas of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola, are variously referred to as Bushmen, San, Sho, Barwa, Kung, or Khwe...
and most other tribes says that the honeyguide must be thanked with a gift of honey; if not, it may lead its follower to a lion
Lion
The lion is one of the four big cats in the genus Panthera, and a member of the family Felidae. With some males exceeding 250 kg in weight, it is the second-largest living cat after the tiger...
, bull elephant
Elephant
Elephants are large land mammals in two extant genera of the family Elephantidae: Elephas and Loxodonta, with the third genus Mammuthus extinct...
, or venomous snake
Snake
Snakes are elongate, legless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes that can be distinguished from legless lizards by their lack of eyelids and external ears. Like all squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales...
as punishment. However, "others maintain that honeycomb spoils the bird, and leave it to find its own bits of comb" (Short, Horne, and Diamond 2003).
Guiding of non-human animals?
Many sources, such as Attenborough (1998), the African Wildlife FoundationAfrican Wildlife Foundation
The African Wildlife Foundation , founded in 1961 as the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, is an international conservation organization that focuses on critically important landscapes in Africa....
, Estes (1999), and Zimmerman, Turner, and Pearson (1999), say that this species also guides Honey Badgers (ratels). Friedmann (1955, quoted by Harper) notes that Sparrman
Anders Sparrman
Anders Erikson Sparrman was a Swedish naturalist, abolitionist and an apostle of Carl Linnaeus....
said in the 18th century that indigenous Africans reported this interaction, but Friedmann adds that no biologist has seen it. According to Dean and MacDonald (1981), Friedmann does quote reports that Greater Honeyguides guide baboon
Baboon
Baboons are African and Arabian Old World monkeys belonging to the genus Papio, part of the subfamily Cercopithecinae. There are five species, which are some of the largest non-hominoid members of the primate order; only the mandrill and the drill are larger...
s and speculates that the behavior evolved
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
in relation to these species before the appearance of humanity. However, they state,
In addition to that listed by Friedmann (1955:41-47), the only recent record is of a Greater Honeyguide giving its guiding call to baboons at Wankie Game Reserve, Zimbabwe (C. J. Vernon, pers. comm.). However, Vernon did not see a positive response by the baboons to the honeyguide. No additional records of honeyguides and Ratels have been reported since Friedmann (1955) and the first-hand accounts given in his review in support of this association are all of incomplete guiding sequences. No biologist has ever reported this association.
Dean and MacDonald go on to express doubt that honeyguides guide other animals and suggest that the behavior may have evolved with "early man". Short and Horne (2002b) agree, noting that bee colonies are seasonally very common in Africa and Ratels probably have no trouble finding them.
Another argument against guiding of non-human animals is that near cities, where Africans increasingly buy sugar
Sugar
Sugar is a class of edible crystalline carbohydrates, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose, characterized by a sweet flavor.Sucrose in its refined form primarily comes from sugar cane and sugar beet...
rather than hunting for wild honey, guiding behavior is disappearing. Ultimately it may disappear everywhere (Short, Horne, and Diamond 2003).
Other food
The Greater Honeyguide also catches some flying insects, especially swarming termiteTermite
Termites are a group of eusocial insects that, until recently, were classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera , but are now accepted as the epifamily Termitoidae, of the cockroach order Blattodea...
s. It sometimes follows mammals or birds to catch the insects they flush, and joins mixed-species flocks
Mixed-species feeding flock
A mixed-species feeding flock, also termed a mixed-species foraging flock, mixed hunting party or informally bird wave, is a flock of usually insectivorous birds of different species, that join each other and move together while foraging...
in ones and twos. It has been known to eat the eggs of small birds.
Reproduction
In addition to being a predator of insects and a mutualist with its follower species, the Greater Honeyguide is a brood parasiteBrood parasite
Brood parasites are organisms that use the strategy of brood parasitism, a kind of kleptoparasitism found among birds, fish or insects, involving the manipulation and use of host individuals either of the same or different species to raise the young of the brood-parasite...
. It lays white eggs in series of 3 to 7, for a total of 10 to 20 in a year. Each egg is laid in a different nest of a bird of another species, including some woodpeckers, barbet
Barbet
American barbets, family Capitonidae, are near passerine birds of the order Piciformes which inhabit humid forests in Central and South America. They are closely related to the toucans....
s, kingfisher
Kingfisher
Kingfishers are a group of small to medium sized brightly coloured birds in the order Coraciiformes. They have a cosmopolitan distribution, with most species being found in the Old World and Australia...
s, bee-eater
Bee-eater
The bee-eaters are a group of near-passerine birds in the family Meropidae. Most species are found in Africa and Asia but others occur in southern Europe, Australia, and New Guinea. They are characterised by richly coloured plumage, slender bodies, and usually elongated central tail feathers...
s, woodhoopoe
Woodhoopoe
The Wood hoopoes and scimitarbills are a small African family, Phoeniculidae, of near passerine birds. They live south of the Sahara Desert and are not migratory. While the family is now restricted to sub-Saharan Africa, fossil evidence shows that the family once had a larger distribution...
s, starling
Starling
Starlings are small to medium-sized passerine birds in the family Sturnidae. The name "Sturnidae" comes from the Latin word for starling, sturnus. Many Asian species, particularly the larger ones, are called mynas, and many African species are known as glossy starlings because of their iridescent...
s, and large swallows. All the species parasitized nest in holes, covered nests, or deep cup nests. The chick has a membranous hook on the bill that it uses, while still blind and featherless, to kill the host's young outright or by repeated wounds.