The honey Guide

Unit 4 Reading

The Honey Guide

Honey is not only a good source of natural sugar,it is also delicious. Most people an many animals like eating it. However, unless people build beehives, the only way for them to get honey is to find a bee’s nest and take the honey from it. Often, these nest are high up in the trees, and it is difficult to find them. In parts of Africa, though, people and animals looking for honey have a strange an unexpected helper---- a little bird called a honey guide.

The honey guide does not actually like honey, but it does like the wax in the bee’s honeycomb. The little bird can not reach this wax, which is deep inside the bee’s nest. So when it finds a suitable nest, it looks for someone to help it. The honey guide gives a loud cry that attracts the attention of both passing animals an people. Once it has their attention, it flies through the forest, constantly waiting for the curious animal or person as it leads them to the nest. When they finally arrive at the nest, the followers reaches in to get at the delicious honey as the bird patiently waits and watches. Some of the honey, an the wax, always falls to the ground, an this is when the honey guide takes its share.

Scientists do not know how the honey guide digests the wax, but it is very determined to its efforts to get it. The birds seem to be able to smell wax from a long distance away. They will quickly arrive whenever a local beekeeper is taking honey from his beehives, and will even enter churches when beeswax are being hit.

If a person follows a honey guide to a nest, the bird is especially sure of getting a good share of the honeycomb. Tribesmen in Africa are, very grateful to the honey guide for leading them to good sources of honey, but they are also afraid of the little bird. They believe that i they do not open a bee’s nest and leave some honeycomb for the honey guide, the next time the bird cries to them through the forest it will lea them to a snake or a leopard in revenge.