- A new study reveals the economic importance of wild honeyguide birds to villages in northern Mozambique.
- Three-quarters of the honey collected by honey-hunters in Niassa Special Reserve is found with the help of the birds, a new study finds.
- Some of the honey is sold, underscoring the economic importance of the birds to families in a region where rates of hunger, poverty and unemployment are high.
- The human-honeyguide partnership remains strong in Niassa, unlike in areas with widespread beekeeping, and researchers see potential for honey-hunters to support conservation efforts.
Honey-hunters in northern Mozambique rely on honeyguide birds to locate three-quarters of their harvest each year, a new study says, underscoring the economic value these wild birds play in the lives of one of the country’s remotest communities. Honey-hunters in all 47 villages in the 4.2-million-hectare (10.4-million-acre) Niassa Special Reserve get help from the birds to find wild bees’ nests, says study lead author and behavioral ecologist Jessica van der Wal.
“It’s quite a vital income and an addition to other livelihood options they have, such as fishing and farming,” Van der Wal says.
The honey-hunters use unique calls to attract greater honeyguides (Indicator indicator), small brown birds a little bigger and leaner than sparrows, that lead them to the nests of African honey bees (Apis mellifera scutellata). The hunters then subdue the bees with smoke and prise open the nests to extract the honeycombs, leaving beeswax and larvae as a reward for their honeyguide companions.
The researchers interviewed 141 honey hunters in 13 villages in Niassa in 2019, and combined that data with figures on honey hunting collected by community wildlife guardians in 46 of the reserve’s 47 villages. For nearly 20 years these guardians, who include both men and women recruited in the villages where they were born and raised, have collected information ranging from baboon raids on people’s crops, to the size and type of fish caught in Niassa’s rivers. But they have also, since 2021, documented quantities of honey collected by honey-hunters with help from honeyguides.
“Every honey-hunter reports from a given honey hunt how much honey they collected and whether that was [done] with the help of honeyguides or not,” says Van der Wal, a research fellow at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, South Africa, and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, Germany. “We looked at that, we averaged that, and we found that from the total volume of honey that was collected, 75% was done with the help of honeyguides.”
She and her colleagues, who published their findings in the journal Ecosystem Services, estimate that around 500 honey-hunters in Niassa collect 14,000 liters (3,700 gallons) of honey per year with the help of the birds. The harvest was valued at more than $23,000 in 2018 and more than $40,000 in 2023.
Most of Niassa’s residents, estimated to total 67,000 people from the Yao, Matambwe and Macua ethnic groups, live on less than $2 per day, according to official figures. Only around 2,000 locals have jobs in Niassa in the few sectors that offer formal employment, like tourism and government administration. This means the modest sums earned from honey sales by hundreds of honey-hunters does make a big difference.
And while the focus of the study was on those who sell wild honey, many others use the birds to help them find honey for household consumption, particularly in years of drought, when it provides a buffer against shortages of staple foods like maize.
“We found that 56% of interviewees honey-hunt more in years of hunger,” Van der Wal says. “Honeyguides are a very reliable tool.”
Some Niassa villagers do use traditional bark beehives, and some commercially manufactured ones have been introduced to deter elephants from raiding crops. But on the whole, formal beekeeping takes a back seat to honey-hunting. Ecologist Mazi Sanda from Cameroon’s University of Ngaoundéré, who wasn’t part of Van der Wal’s study, says the relative absence of beekeeping in Niassa is likely the reason the human-honeyguide partnership persists so strongly.
Honey was historically harvested with the help of honeyguides in the Adamaoua region of central Cameroon, where Sanda is studying honey hunting and beekeeping, but now maintained beehives interfere with the honey hunt.
“Some people [in Adamaoua] said if you follow the birds they will guide you to someone’s hives, then it’s not possible for you to harvest [that honey]. This is one of the reasons people are not following the birds anymore,” Sanda says.
“If this cooperation is no longer active, then the birds will look for something else [to cooperate with], and the activity will stop.”
The partnership persists among some communities in Adamaoua, such as Fulani cattle herders, though Sanda is still conducting interviews with informants to determine the volumes of honey they collect and whether there’s any surplus to sell.
Although some critics accuse Niassa’s honey-hunters of cutting down trees, starting fires or acting as a front for illegal activities such as hunting, the honeyguide research team is studying how honey hunting influences Niassa’s ecosystem through its effects on bees, trees and fire. Van der Wal and her colleagues say there’s a real potential for honey-hunters to be enlisted as conservation allies.
“Their wide search for bees’ nests gives them the opportunity to detect and report relevant illegal activities that might otherwise go undetected,” they state.
World is losing ‘magical’ tradition of human-animal mutualism, study warns
Citation:
Van der Wal, J. E., Dauda, C., Lloyd-Jones, D. J., Murico, H., Begg, C. M., Begg, K. S., … Spottiswoode, C. N. (2025). The economic value of human-honeyguide mutualism in Reserva Especial do Niassa, Moçambique. Ecosystem Services, 72, 101696. doi:10.1016/j.ecoser.2024.101696
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