262 BULLETIN 2 08, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



tion, then in another. In Nyasaland, the Bensons (1948, p. 392) saw 

 one hawking for insects on the wing Uke a flycatcher. When actually 

 capturing an insect it tended to hover with its taU widely spread. 

 Colonel Stockley (in litt.) saw a couple (pair?) of these birds working 

 the undersides of large acacia branches for insects in the bark. In 

 their searching they reminded him of the spider hunters (Arachnothera) 

 of southern Asia. This was on the Lorogi Plateau, Kenya Colony. 

 Also in Kenya Colony, Williams writes me that he saw this species 

 flying out from its perch, catching insects, and then returning to the 

 same twig, like a flycatcher, thus agreeing with the observations of 

 the Bensons. In the Thika area Williams has seen it in vicinity of 

 native beehives, in company with other species of honey-guides, and 

 suggests that it may be not uninterested in these hives, as in the 

 stomach contents of most of the examples he collected there were 

 quantities of beeswax, as in the species of Indicator, as well as insect 

 fragments including lepidopterous and coleopterous larvae. 



Butler (in Sclater and Mackworth-Praed, 1919, p. 640) found it 

 feeding on the flowers of the tartar tree (Sterculia cinered), where he 

 repeatedly saw it. Stoehr (in Stoehr and Sclater, 1906, p. 106) found 

 it flitting about, like a warbler or a flycatcher, among the bushes in 

 Northern Rhodesia. Davies (1907, p. 193) saw several of this species 

 hunting for insects among the branches of black wattle trees in 

 Pondoland; Beven (1946, p. 67), in the Transvaal, watched two of 

 them feeding on membracids lil^e warblers. In the Chyulu Hills, 

 Kenya Colony, van Someren (1939, p. 53) found this honey-guide 

 feeding on scale insects. In the stomach of one that he shot was a 

 mass of coccids which had been removed from a Loranthus. 



Vincent (in A. Roberts, 1930b) saw one feeding avidly on the 

 American blight or wooly aphis (Schizoneura lanigera) on apple trees 

 in a neglected orchard. A few weeks later he saw three more, together 

 with a pair of green white-eyes {Zosterops virens) and a black tit 

 (Parus niger) m the same tree, again feeding on the wooly aphis. 



All the individuals that I observed were either perching quietly, not 

 feeding, or were found by seeing them fly out after passing insects, 

 when their white outer tail feathers and undulating flight made them 

 readily identifiable. The gizzards of seven specimens collected con- 

 tained remains of unidentified small insects and a mass of whitish 

 yellow waxy material that may have been either beeswax or the 

 exudations of scale insects. 



Aside from the one fledgling still attended by its foster parents, 

 Petronia superciliosus, when collected by Vincent, we have no knowl- 

 edge of the food the young honey-guide may get. In its stomach was 

 a deep golden yellow sticky mass flecked with small insect remains 

 (data from label of specimen in British Museum). What the sticky 



