THE HONEY-GUIDES 41 



behavior as if to urge and entice, or it may give up easily and leave. 

 No critical data are available as to why this activity may vary from 

 individual to individual and from time to time. 



A would-be "guiding" bird may sometimes follow a person for a very 

 long distance (five miles is the maximum known to me) or for a very 

 considerable period of time (half an hour is the maximum I know of) 

 to attempt to get him to follow it. 



The greater honey-guide leads ratels, baboons (data still very 

 meager), and humans to bees' nests. It occasionally, but without 

 success, attempts to get other animals — such as a monkey or mon- 

 goose — to follow. Because of the biological interest in this symbiotic 

 relationship, a full discussion is in order here. 



Mammalian symbionts 



Number and kinds of symbionts: Guiding implies the existence 

 and presence of something to be guided, or a follower that might be 

 termed, from the standpoint of the biological end served by the habit, a 

 temporary foraging symbiont.^ Because of the complexity of the 

 habit and all that its survival value (as distinct from its individual 

 enactment) implies, it seems probable that a very considerable time 

 span must have been involved in its development. This, in turn, 

 suggests that there was a "co-operator," or a "follower," before the 

 native African human associated himself with the bird in the finding 

 of honey. 



Many authors have written that the ratel or honey-badger (Melli- 

 vora capensis) is the original associate of the honey-guide in these 

 quests for bees' nests, and that the natives (and, from them, Euro- 

 peans) have stumbled onto the advantage of following the birds from 

 seeing ratels doing so. However, in spite of the vividness and elabora- 

 tion of some of these descriptions, none of the writers seems actually 

 to have witnessed the association between the honey-guide and the 

 ratel, but all have, often unwittingly, based their accounts on those 

 of earlier writers, the eventual source for all of them being Sparrman 

 (1785), who appears to have received his data from the natives and 

 not from personal observation. 



Sparrman did not attempt more than to record the story without 

 embellishing it, but later writers have added to it. Perhaps the most 

 detailed of these more recent descriptions is that given by Stevenson- 

 Hamilton (1947, p. 242). This account reads as though it may have 

 been based on personal observation, although no definite statement 

 to that effect is made, and no such conclusion can be deduced from it. 



» This term seems better than what van Beneden (1876) would have called a 

 "free messmate." 



309265—55 4 



