Many animals in southern Africa feed on beeswax and, by doing so, they help maintain a unique partnership between humans and birds that lead honey-hunters to wild bees’ nests.
Until now, it was thought that very few animals apart from greater honeyguides (Indicator indicator) could digest beeswax – a high-energy food that the birds obtain as a reward from humans who break open bees’ nests.
at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and his colleagues wanted to see if larger animals feeding on the wax from bees’ nests would undermine the hunter-bird partnership by depriving the honeyguide of its reward.
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They set up camera traps at 26 sites in the densely wooded Niassa Special Reserve in Mozambique where honey had been harvested and wax left aside by honey-hunters from the Yao community.
They observed nine other species feeding on the wax, including honey badgers, African civets, two other species of honeyguide that don’t cooperate with humans and five animals not previously known to eat wax: yellow baboons, slender and Meller’s mongooses, striped bush squirrels and crowned hornbills.
“With their dexterity, I expected to see baboons picking through bee comb and leaving the wax pieces behind. Instead, they deliberately ate everything,” says Lloyd-Jones.
In most cases, the greater honeyguide that led the humans arrived at the wax reward long before any competitors did. The other animals that ate the wax edged out the honeyguide’s main rivals – other late-arriving greater honeyguides – thus helping the partnership persist by favouring birds that cooperate with humans.
“As with many types of food, the best gets eaten first,” says Lloyd-Jones. “We show that many other animals within the ecosystem help maintain the mutualism while benefiting from it nutritionally.”
Human-honeyguide interactions in Africa are a rare example of cooperation between humans and wildlife, and scientists and conservationists want to see it persist. For that to happen, the diverse guild of wax-eating animals that join in the feast also needs to be conserved, says Lloyd-Jones.
“We have a greater understanding than before of how the mutualism affects, and is affected by, the ecosystem around it, and the importance of maintaining an intact ecosystem for the healthy functioning of honeyguide-human cooperation,” he says.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
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