166 BULLETIN 2 08, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



angustus. In Ethiopia, Pease (in Ogilvie-Grant, Reid and Pease, 

 1901, p. 667) found the "crop" of an adult to contain ants and other 

 small insects. Beetle remains have been recorded in a stomach from 

 the Belgian Congo, where Chapin found a variety of insect remains 

 mixed with the wax in practically aU of the honey-guide stomachs he 

 examined. In the Mount Elgon area Granvik (1923, pp. 83-84) 

 found stomachs to contain gravel, pebbles, and insect remains. In 

 Ethiopia, Heuglin (1869, pp. 767-769) noted the birds' stomachs held 

 larvae, honey, wax, termite eggs, caterpillars, and bees. In Angola, 

 Bocage found a locust in the stomach of a greater honey-guide. To 

 complete our inventory of the known food items eaten by the adult 

 birds, I may merely add that a specimen shot near Kasempa, Northern 

 Rhodesia, by E. L. Button and now in the Transvaal Museum bears 

 on its label a note to the effect that the "crop contained small seeds 

 and a white substance, possibl}^ berries, and the pulp from one of the 

 local trees." The last mentioned item recalls the case often cited of 

 a woodpecker feeding on the cambium and bast of trees. 



I know of only one published note on a greater honey-guide in 

 captivity and on what it ate there. Porter (1927) kept an immature 

 (yellow-throated) bird at large in his room. The first night he fed 

 it on flies mixed with syrup (apparently he thought of honey-guides 

 as honey eaters), but later he fed it soft insects and honeycomb. 

 The bird ate several times its own weight in a week and refused to 

 touch "hard insects or artificial food," A South African aviculturist, 

 W. R. Carthew, informs me that he has kept both greater and lesser 

 honey-guides for over a year on a diet of bread and whole milk with 

 sugar or syrup, supplemented by ants and mealworms. When meal- 

 worms were not available, a substitute of raw chopped meat mixed 

 with raw egg was found satisfactory. He occasionally gave the birds 

 pieces of bee comb containing larvae; he saw the birds extract the 

 latter but did not observe them eating the comb itself. 



The question has been raised from time to time as to whether or 

 not honey-guides, like certain other parasitic birds, may remove and 

 eat eggs from nests into which they may lay. There are no positive 

 data. Skead (1951, p. 61) saw a male greater honey-guide steal an 

 egg from a nest of a bar-throated bush warbler {Apalis thoracica) in 

 the eastern Cape Province. While the bird was not actually seen to 

 eat the egg, the probabilities are that it did so. Inasmuch as the 

 Apalis is not the kind of bird that the honey-guide would ordinarily 

 parasitize, and inasmuch as the bird that took the egg was a male 

 (and hence not a potential egg-layer), it would seem that this observa- 

 tion would imply a nest-robbing, egg-eating habit, as such, and not 

 necessarily only as an accessory to parasitic reproduction. 



