Acoustic recording of human and honeyguide communication during a honey-hunt. Photo by Claire Spottiswoode.
In a new study from the Honeyguide Research Project, we are excited to present evidence that honeyguides occasionally guide humans to non-bee animals. Our research – which builds on centuries of reports by a wide variety of human cultures across Africa – shows how the behaviour of honeyguides when guiding humans to wild bees’ nests, is spatially and acoustically similar to when honeyguides guide humans to other kinds of animal. In Niassa Special Reserve, where this research was conducted, we find this to be a rare behaviour (occurring on around 1% of honey-hunting interactions). We suggest that the most likely explanation for such behaviour is not as punishment for not previously rewarding the birds with beeswax, nor as a form of altruistic warning behaviour, but rather, due to cognitive mistakes in the birds’ spatial recall. One news piece neatly titled this “Malice or Memory-lapse?”, making us wish we’d thought of this title first.
For more details, see “To bees or not to bees: greater honeyguides sometimes guide humans to animals other than bees, but likely not as punishment” by David Lloyd-Jones, honey-hunter Musaji Muamedi and project leader Claire Spottiswoode, published in Ecology and Evolution.