THE HONEY-GUIDES 25 



The guiding habit 



All the early accounts of the guiding habit, even when the species 

 of honey-guide involved was not definitely stated, may safely be 

 taken to refer to the greater honey-guide. As will be seen, these 

 early records of our pioneering predecessors, while historically inter- 

 esting, appear to be based to a very large extent on information 

 gathered from the natives rather than on the personal experience of 

 their narrators. 



History of our knowledge of the habit 



The earliest reference known to me concerning the honey-guides 

 and their habit of leading men to bees' nests is in a book entitled 

 "Ethiopia Oriental" b}^ Joao dos Santos, a Portuguese missionary to 

 Sofala, in what is now Portuguese East Africa, first written in 1569 

 and printed in 1609. In that work the bird is discussed on pages 

 35, 36 under the marginal title *'Sazu passaro que come cera" [Sazu, 

 a bird that eats waxj; sazu being the local native name for the two 

 conmion species, /. indicator and /. minor. It appears that this bird 

 attracted the attention of the good padre because he noted it fl3'ing 

 in through the open window into his mission church to feed on the 

 bits of wax in the candlesticks on the altar.^ In his account he tells 

 us that the sazu frequents the woods in search of bees' nests, which 

 are very numerous both in holes in the ground and in the trunks of 

 trees, and says that when the birds find a beehive they go to the 

 roads in search of men and lead them to the hives by flying on before 

 them, flapping their wings actively as they go from branch to branch, 

 and giving their harsh cries. As soon as the natives notice the birds 

 acting in this way they follow them, as they are very fond of honey. 

 The profit that the birds reap from all this is that they feed on the 



* Considering that the first observations of the greater honey-guide occurred 

 in a missionary's little church, it is of interest to find nearly four centuries later 

 that Charbonneau-Lassay (1940) suggested that the honey-guide (no specific 

 identification but by inference the greater honey-guide) may figure in the symbolic 

 iconography of the Catholic church in Abyssinia. He reasons that not only does 

 the bird lead men to "sweetness" but also to bees, which in the Middle Ages were 

 used as an example, especially to the friars and nuns, of an ideal life of communal 

 industry and cenobitic chastity and, to a wider audience, as a symbol of the 

 Resurrection. In one of his sermons, Peter of Capua refers to the risen Christ 

 as "apis aetherea," while not infrequently the saints noted for good works were 

 compared to bees. The usage impUed by Charbonneau-Lassay seems to be based 

 solely on the inclusion of the thought in a letter written by Leopold Martin (a 

 member of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul and a missionary to Abyssinia at the 

 beginning of the present century) addressed to a colleague, the Abb6 Dury, curate 

 of Chalais. 



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