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.

Lailat Guta and Jessica van der Wal returned to the Niassa Special Reserve, to visit our long-term collaborators in the Mbamba honey-hunting community and at Mariri Environmental Centre. As part of Lailat’s MSc research on the relationship between honey-hunting and the broader ecosystem, Lailat and Jessica are conducting interviews with honey-hunters and other knowledgeable individuals to document the economic and cultural values of trees and crops, and their dependence on bees.