THE HONEY-GUIDES 33 



the vicinity of a bee's nest is reached. Here the bird often (usually, 

 in my experience) suddenly ceases calling and perches quietly in a 

 tree nearby. Some observers record no such cessation of the churring 

 notes when near the bees' nest, but all agree that the bird perches 

 unobtrusively in a nearby tree or shrub and there waits for the 

 follower to open the hive, and it usually remains there until the person 

 has departed with his loot of honeycomb, when it comes down to the 

 plundered bees' nest and begins to feed on the bits of comb left 

 strewn about. The time during which the bird may wait quietly 

 may vary from a few minutes to well over an hour and a half. 



I know of no reliable evidence supporting the contention that the 

 honey-guide necessarily leads only to nests of certain kinds of bees 

 and not of others. Yet such has been claimed by a few writers. 

 Hughes (1933, p. 335) states that the birds seem to ignore the nests of 

 certain tiny black bees (not identified) which usually are found in the 

 hollow knots in trees and readily spotted by the thick, black streak 

 trailing down beneath the opening. Bodenheimer (1951, pp. 180-181), 

 referring to this account and also to one by Marais, mentions two 

 kinds of bees in the northern Transvaal. One of these, Trigora 

 clypeata Friese, lives in very hard, virtually impenetrable soil. "Even 

 the honey-guide, partial to wax, does not lead his allies to the ground 

 or arboreal nests of wild bees." What Marais (1912) actually says is 

 that "stingless as they are, the Moka bees are well protected against 

 all honey-thieves, and especially against man and the ratel. The 

 honey-bird never leads to one of their hives." Both Hughes and 

 Marais seem to be writing loosely ; their statements lack the corrobo- 

 rating details necessary to transform them into evidence. 



Guiding is usually done by one bird; in fact, of all the literally 

 hundreds of individual guidings that I have been told about or have 

 read of, I know of only a small number of instances where two birds 

 were involved jointly prior to the arrival at the bees' nest by the 

 guiding bird. Mr. Will Foster, Superintendent of the Umfolozi 

 Reserve, Zululand, tells me that once he was guided by two birds 

 which appeared to be "working together"; unfortunately, he noted 

 nothing further about them. Mr. E. M. North, Makueni, Kenya 

 Colony, writes me that he was once followed by a pair of adult birds 

 for about half a mile (about 10 minutes) that were trying to get him to 

 leave his work and follow them. These two birds arrived and remained 

 together throughout this period (about 10 minutes), at the end of 

 which time North rejoined his lorry without having the time to follow 

 the honey-guides. 



A third case is one reported by Chapin (1939) in the Belgian Congo, 

 near Farad je, in November. He and his native assistants were 

 following a guiding male when "another male joined him. We had 



