An American missionary had a harrowing experience with these Cyprians. He was in Benguela, walking peacefully down the main street, which was then only a dirt road. A swarm of the bees flew by and stopped to cluster on his head and body. Natives gathered around, but at a discreet distance, for they were too terrified to do anything. Being a man with presence of mind, the missionary sat down in the middle of the street, which was fortunately very dusty. Slowly and gently he gathered up handfuls of the dust and threw it up and over and around his head at the bees. They continued to buzz around him for many long minutes, but the dust finally drove them away, leaving him unharmed, and, no doubt, immeasurably relieved. When I went from our mission station at the foot of Mt. Elende farther into the interior to stake out the concession where our Central Institute was later built, at Dondi, the trip was memorable for the intimate acquaintance it provided with that member of the cuckoo family which ornithologists call Indicator Major.
Commonly we call it the "honey guide," Boers, the "honey bird," and the natives by a name that gives no clue to the activity that makes it famous. It is unpretentious to look at, brown above, darker on the wings and tail, and grayish-white on the under surface of the body. The story that it deliberately leads men to honey, in order to get itself a meal of otherwise unobtainable sweets, or grubs, sounds like a tall tale, but has been well authenticated as fact and not fiction. African hunters know the honey bird well. We were following the watershed between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. It was country about as gently rolling as southern Wisconsin, and somewhat the same type-plains with scrubby brush, little stream valleys with woodland growth. The streams run one way into Keve and the Atlantic, the other way into Kuvangu and the Zambezi-whose original name, Sambesi, means "father of fish."
Along this watershed winds the old Boer transport route. Ordinarily, in the country of the Ovimbundu, there would have been beehives all along our way. But the natives had discovered that there was no use putting them out. Among themselves it was a crime to rob another man's hives, and, whatever the taboo was, it worked. But, along the transport route, men of other tribes, employed by whites, robbed the hives of their honey, destroyed them, or threw them uselessly to the ground. The bee-keepers, for five miles on either side of the route, had given up struggling against these depredations. All the bees in that neighbour, hood, whether they had ever been domesticated or not, had gone back to the wild.
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