72 BULLETIN 2 08, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



As a still further instance, we may recall that the pioneer of all 

 honey-guide students, the Portuguese missionary Joao dos Santos, 

 writing in 1569, found this species coming into his little mission 

 church at Sofala to nibble on the beeswax in the candlesticks on the 

 altar. By the time the wax had been melted and formed into candles 

 there could hardly have been any dried pollen or honey or bee larvae 

 left in it. Dos Santos, while recounting what his natives told him 

 of its guiding habits, yet calls the bird "sazu, the bird that eats wax, " 

 a clearer and truer statement than any made in the next 375 years. 



Native stories, such as one related by Junod (1913, pp. 319-320), 

 suggest that some of the natives may have had some understanding 

 of the birds being interested in the wax and not the honey. Thus, 

 in his account of a Thonga description of the guiding habit, Junod 

 writes: "The fortunate wayfarer can eat to his heart's content and 

 gives the bird the wax. If he wants to be shown a second tree, he 

 has only to burn the wax: the nhalala [honey-guide] not having had 

 its full share of the treat will lead him to another." 



These cases raise the question as to how the bird becomes aware of 

 the presence of wax in places where apparently there are no bees 

 flying in and out. To this there is no satisfactory answer as yet. 

 The possibility of their finding it by smell is very slight as birds 

 generally have but poor olfactory acuity. It is conceivable that the 

 birds may have seen humans entering and leaving these structures 

 and followed them to try to lead them to bees' nests; instead, they 

 found stores of readily available wax. In the cases of the barns con- 

 taining foundation wax, the farmers were bee-keepers and had bees 

 nearby. 



In the Umtaleni Valley, eastern Cape Province, observations by 

 C. J. Skead and myself showed a similar but less pronounced pref- 

 erence for wax as compared to honey or bee larvae. We placed a 

 piece of comb containing young bees on a branch and watched a male 

 adult greater honey-guide eating it. The bird went first for the wax 

 and it was not until after nine pieces of wax had been eaten that the 

 first larva was extracted and swallowed. On one occasion, just after 

 a piece of comb had been placed in his favorite caU-tree, the bird 

 nibbled bits off the edge of the comb, pausing for fairly long spells to 

 look about him as though he heard something unusual. Then he 

 would take another nibble or might give a series of call notes. The 

 bird ate leisurely and gave the impression of not being hungry, but 

 sometimes he pecked more lustily at the wax, tearing it off and making 

 fragments fly about while he ate small pieces at a time. On another 

 occasion, in the space of three minutes, the same bird (at least a 

 similar adult male at the same perch in the same tree) swaUowed 

 nine or ten bits of wax, including a very sizable piece about half or 



