Are Birds and Honey Badgers Teaming Up to Steal From the Bees?

There is a bird that loves to eat beeswax but is unable to break open a bees' nest to get it. Known as a honeyguide, these birds have figured out that humans love honey and leave the wax behind—so the birds guide humans to hives.

This much is true. But like something straight from a Pixar screenplay, lore has it that honeyguides also lead honey badgers to nests, at which point the badger rips it open and together they revel in the honey-and-wax glory. But is this fact or fiction?

Now, a new study tackles the mystery of honeyguides collaborating with honey badgers.

“While researching honeyguides, we have been guided to bees’ nests by honeyguide birds thousands of times, but none of us have ever seen a bird and a badger interact to find honey,” says Dr Jessica van der Wal at the University of Cape Town, lead author of the study.

“It’s well-established that honeyguides lead humans to bees’ nests, but evidence for bird and badger cooperation in the literature is patchy," she adds. "It tends to be old, second-hand accounts of someone saying what their friend saw. So we decided to ask the experts directly.”

In what is being called the first large-scale search for evidence of the mixed-species collaboration, a team of researchers from nine African countries, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Cape Town, conducted some 400 interviews with honey hunters in 11 communities across Africa.

The greater honeyguide bird has been used for generations to find bees’ nests. Wild honey is a high-energy food that can provide up to 20% of calorie intake, notes the University of Cambridge in a summary of the study, and the wax that hunters share or discard is a valuable food for the honeyguide.

“The honeyguides call to the humans, and the humans call back—it’s a kind of conversation as they move through the landscape towards the bees’ nests,” says Dr. Claire Spottiswoode from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and joint senior author of the study.

(Fun fact, the scientific name for the greater honeyguide bird is Indicator indicator. How apropos is that?)

Most of the honey hunters they interviewed did not confirm having observed honeyguide birds and honey badgers helping each other access honey—80% had never seen the two species interact.

But as explained by the University of Cambridge, "responses of three communities in Tanzania stood out, where many people said they’d seen honeyguide birds and honey badgers cooperating to get honey and beeswax from bees’ nests. Sightings were most common amongst the Hadzabe honey-hunters, of which 61% said they had seen the interaction."

“Hadzabe hunter-gatherers quietly move through the landscape while hunting animals with bows and arrows, so are poised to observe badgers and honeyguides interacting without disturbing them. Over half of the hunters reported witnessing these interactions, on a few rare occasions,” said Dr Brian Wood from the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-authored the study.

They say that it's possible that some Tanzanian populations of honey badgers have developed the skills and knowledge needed to cooperate with honeyguide birds, and they pass these skills down from one generation to the next.

It’s also possible, they say, that the dynamic duo teams up in more places in Africa, but the interactions just haven’t been seen.

“The interaction is difficult to observe because of the confounding effect of human presence: observers can’t know for sure who the honeyguide bird is talking to—them or the badger,” said Dr. Dominic Cram in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, a senior author of the study.

“But we have to take these interviews at face value," he adds. "Three communities report to have seen honeyguide birds and honey badgers interacting, and it’s probably no coincidence that they’re all in Tanzania.”

Humans are helpful for honeyguides. We have tools to access the nests and smoke to subdue the bees. But as the researchers point out, honeyguide birds have been around far longer than modern humans with our fire and tools.

“Some have speculated that the guiding behaviour of honeyguides might have evolved through interactions with honey badgers, but then the birds switched to working with humans when we came on the scene because of our superior skills in subduing bees and accessing bees’ nests. It’s an intriguing idea, but hard to test,” said Spottiswoode.

Regardless, we know that Indicator indicator is definitely indicating where the bees are for human honey hunters—and as it now appears likely, in Tanzania at least, for honey badgers as well. Pixar, eat your heart out.

The study was published in the Journal of Zoology.