Honeyguides
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40 free Honeyguides trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The honeyguide is one of the few wild animals that seeks out humans on purpose. In parts of Africa it flies up to honey-hunters, chatters to get their attention and leads them through the bush to a hive, then waits for its share once the hive is opened. No one trains it, and scientists are still working out how the arrangement began. This quiz turns the best honeyguide bird fun facts into questions: how the birds and their human partners signal to each other, what the birds actually eat, the folklore and disputed legends around them, and the far darker way a honeyguide starts its life as an uninvited guest. A few questions cover the lesser-known members of the family and the researchers who study them. It suits bird lovers, students and teachers, and anyone who has seen the partnership in a nature documentary and wondered how much of it is true. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will finish knowing far more about honeyguides than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which literary pair did a researcher liken the greater honeyguide to, for helping people yet killing its nestmates?
Jekyll and Hyde
Jekyll and Hyde was the comparison, because the same bird that shares the spoils of a hive with people hatches in a stolen nest and kills its foster siblings within days.
Q 02In 1588 a missionary saw a small bird, now known as a honeyguide, slip into his church to nibble what?
Candles
Candles made of beeswax drew the bird in, and the missionary went on to write the first known account of it leading men to bees' nests.
Q 03Besides honeyguides, which sea mammals are known to help people find food, by driving mullet into fishermen's nets?
Dolphins
Dolphins in Brazil herd fish toward waiting fishermen and catch more for themselves, the one partnership researchers call comparable to the honeyguide's.
Q 04Why do Hadza honey-hunters often burn, bury or hide the leftover wax instead of leaving it for the honeyguide?
To keep it hungry
To keep it hungry is the aim, since a bird that has not eaten is more likely to guide again, yet the partnership still supplies about a tenth of the Hadza's calories.
Q 05The honey badger, long said to follow honeyguides to hives, is also known by which other name?
Ratel
Ratel is the honey badger's other name. Legends of it following the bird go back centuries, but no biologist has seen it happen, and footage of the pair has been accused of being staged.
Q 06Honeyguides never raise their own chicks, laying eggs in other birds' nests like which better-known family of birds?
Cuckoos
Cuckoos share the trick so closely that the greater honeyguide was first classified as one of them when it was named in 1777.
Q 07What do honey-hunters use to subdue the bees before opening a nest that a honeyguide has led them to?
Smoke
Smoke from a burning bundle of twigs and leaves, hoisted high into the tree, calms the colony before the hunters fell the trunk for its honey.
Q 08Some experts trace the honeyguide's partnership with people back 1.9 million years to which human ancestor?
Homo erectus
Homo erectus is the proposed first partner, though the earliest written record of a bird leading people to honey dates only from the 1500s.
Q 09A 2025 study found that greater honeyguides sometimes lead people not to bees but to which other animals?
Snakes
Snakes turn up at the end of some trips, which folklore calls revenge for an unpaid reward, but the researchers think the birds simply make mistakes.
Q 10The greater honeyguide's scientific name is which Latin word for a guide, repeated twice over?
Indicator
Indicator indicator is the full name, a tautonym in which genus and species match, and the whole family of honeyguides is named after it.
Q 11Which birds are the honeyguides' closest living relatives, placed with them and the toucans in the order Piciformes?
Woodpeckers
Woodpeckers are the nearest kin, yet honeyguides are the only members of the order that feed on wax and the only ones that leave other birds to raise their young.
Q 12Which stringed instrument names the heaviest honeyguide, whose male makes a display sound with its tail in a dive?
Lyre
Lyre is the instrument, after the outward-curving tail feathers that brush against the wind as the bird plunges over West and Central African rainforest.
Q 13At what time of day do honeyguides raid bees' nests on their own, because the bees are cool and sluggish?
Early morning
Q 21What sound do Hadza honey-hunters make to summon a honeyguide, a sound that is unlikely to scare off their prey?
A whistle
A whistle that sounds like birdsong lets the Hadza call their guide without alarming the game they are hunting at the same time.
Q 22Yao honey-hunters call honeyguides with a sound passed down the generations and written brrr-hm, made up of what?
Trill then grunt
Trill then grunt is the formula, and it more than tripled a hunter's chance of being shown a bees' nest when scientists played it back in the bush.
Q 23In Zambia, which everyday sound is said to draw greater honeyguides toward people who might open a hive?
Chopping wood
Early morning is the safest time, because honeyguides are not immune to stings and a swarm of angry bees can kill one.
Q 14Which bodily feature gives honeyguides some protection from stings when they feed at a bees' nest?
Thick skin
Thick skin blunts some stings but does not make the birds immune, and much of the wax they eat comes from nests the bees have already abandoned.
Q 15What does a guiding honeyguide do on reaching the tree with the bees' nest, as a cue to start searching?
It falls silent
It falls silent and perches near the hive, after chattering all the way there, and that hush tells the hunters to look closely.
Q 16The Malaysian honeyguide, one of the family's few species outside Africa, has a call that begins like which animal?
A cat
A cat is what it sounds like, a harsh miaow followed by a rattle, from a bird so little studied that its breeding habits are still largely unknown.
Q 17Which mountain range is home to the yellow-rumped honeyguide, one of only two honeyguides found in Asia?
Himalayas
The Himalayas are its stronghold, from northern India to Myanmar, and unlike its famous African cousin it has never been seen leading people to honey.
Q 18Why is the greater honeyguide's habit of guiding people to bees' nests disappearing near African cities?
Shoppers now buy sugar
Shoppers now buy sugar, so nobody follows the bird, and in parts of Kenya honeyguides have already given up calling to people.
Q 19What weapon does a newly hatched greater honeyguide use to kill the other chicks in its foster parents' nest?
Hooks on its beak
Hooks on its beak, needle-sharp and fully formed at hatching, let the chick bite and shake its nestmates until it is the only mouth left to feed.
Q 20Greater honeyguide chicks kill their nestmates in pitch-dark burrows before which of their own senses has developed?
Sight
Sight comes later: the chicks are still blind and featherless when they attack, and the foster parents go on feeding the killer afterwards.
Chopping wood draws them in, a reminder that the birds need a partner with an axe to break into a nest sealed within a tree.
Q 24From whom did the Yao honey-hunters in a 2016 study say they had learned their honeyguide call?
Their fathers
Their fathers taught it to them and they will teach it to their sons, because honey gathered with the birds still matters in daily life.
Q 25Young greater honeyguides look so unlike the adults that Yao locals take them for what?
A separate species
A separate species is the local verdict, because the reclusive juveniles wear a yellow breast that no adult has.
Q 26A 2023 playback study found that honeyguides respond far more readily to honey-hunters' calls of which kind?
Those used locally
Those used locally win: birds near the Hadza ignored most Yao calls and birds in Yao country ignored most Hadza ones, so the birds must learn the signals.
Q 27Niassa reserve, where Yao honey-hunters call honeyguides, lies in which country on Africa's Indian Ocean coast?
Mozambique
Mozambique holds the reserve, a wilderness about the size of Denmark where the Yao gather wild honey with the birds' help.
Q 28The Hadza, hunter-gatherers who follow honeyguides to honey, live around Lake Eyasi in which East African country?
Tanzania
Tanzania is home to the Hadza, whose rate of finding bees' nests rises by 560 per cent when a honeyguide leads the way.
Q 29Where does a honeyguide's egg spend an extra day of incubation, giving its chick a head start over the host's young?
Inside the mother
Inside the mother is where it starts developing, so the honeyguide chick hatches days ahead and is waiting when the first host chick emerges.
Q 30In Zambia, the greater honeyguide's commonest hosts dig nest burrows into the roofs of holes made by which mammal?
Aardvark
Aardvark holes give the host birds a ready-made earth ceiling to tunnel into, about half a metre long, and the honeyguide slips its egg in.