THE HONEY-GUIDES 233 



of bees which built exposed combs of beeswax there. The honey- 

 guides would perch on the trees and then fly to the cliffs where they 

 often clung like woodpeckers and pecked at the wax. Sometimes 

 they would be within a few feet of the bees, of which they seemed 

 wary and afraid. They gave no sign of asking assistance from man. 

 Gizzards of a dozen or so specimens collected all contained beeswax, 

 also remains of craneflies, and, in one instance, a mammalian haii', 

 probably accidentally swallowed. Stoliczka (1873, p. 425) reports 

 six wasps and some green vegetable matter in the gizzard of his 

 specimen taken at Dungagally. 



The gizzard of Ripley's specimen from Assam (the type specimen 

 of /. X. fulvus) was sent to me, and its contents were examined by Dr. 

 E. A. Chapin and myself. It contained a quantity of unidentifiable 

 particles, probably wax, a great many pieces of flies' legs, five heads of 

 undetermined species of ants, a compound dipterous eye, remains of 

 at least three specimens of two species of chrysomelid beetles and one 

 of a hydrophilid beetle, and two shreds of downy feathers. The bits 

 of feathers were probably adventitiously swallowed after preening, or 

 some such activity. 



That this species also catches insects on the wing like its African 

 relatives is shown by the notes made in Bm-ma by Smythies (1949), 

 who noticed it "sallying out at intervals and fly-catching in the clumsy 

 manner of a Bulbul ... I must have watched it for quite half-an- 

 hour before collecting it for identification. It confined its fly-catching 

 to a 50-yard stretch of sunlit stream." 



Ripley reports that the local native name in the Naga HiUs for this 

 bird is mephi tsu kelie para, which is said to mean "the bird that eats 

 bees," a further confirmation of its interest in hives. 



The late Austin H. Clark called my attention to a statement by 

 Read (1941, p. 12) that "in the To-wu-chih' of Chang Hua (Chin 

 dynasty) it states that honey and beeswax come from the solitary glens 

 of various mountains in the South. The places where the honey is 

 found are all steep cliffs which cannot be climbed, so people go up to 

 the top of the mountain and are let down the precipitous cliffs in a 

 basket and collect the honey. When the bees go away and leave the 

 wax on the rocks flocks of birds like sparrows come and peck it nearly 

 all away. The birds are called . . . ling ch'ueh . . ." According 

 to Wylie (1902), the "Po-wu-chi" was originally drawn up by Chang 

 Hwa in the latter part of the third century, but his production appears 

 to have been lost during the Sung period and the work as we know it 

 was compiled from extracts of it preserved in other works; the com- 

 pilation in ten books, under the title "Suh p6 wvih che," was made by 

 Le Shih about the middle of the 12th century. 



