Have you ever heard of a deal between humans and free-living wild animals? A new study has found that a community in Africa forms a sweet collaboration with greater honeyguides to hunt for honey.

Greater honeyguide, also known as indicator, is a bird species that eats wax. Its name refers to its unique ability of guiding humans to bee colonies. As per the study, the wax-eating bird works with humans to spot honeybee nest, so that honey and wax could be harvested.

How the collaboration works? The study by ethnobiologist Hussein Isack and the team found that the honeyguide bird grabs humans’ attention using it special call. After that, it flies from one tree to another, while moving towards a honeybee colony. Humans follow the bird to spot the bees’ nest. When humans reach the location of the nest, they harvest it using smoke. In return, both, humans and honeyguide, get wax and honey.

For the study, the researchers performed an experiment in Southeastern Africa’s Mozambique. The location was chosen because here humans and the human-wild bird cooperate for a sweet treasure. Niassa National Reserve of Mozambique reported that the honeyguide birds used their unique calls to attract humans. It boosts their chances of finding a bee nest.

The collaboration is a two-way communication. Humans and honeyguides work together to achieve their goal, which is finding a honeybee nest, said evolutionary biologist Claire Spottiswoode from Cambridge. Like the bird, humans also give signal to the bird. This bond between the bird and humans is a reciprocal relationship.

“What is special about the relationship is that it occurs without any traditional kind of coercion or training. The human-wild bird interaction likely evolved over thousands of years of natural selection”, added Spottiswoode

A report published in ARS Technica revealed, "Generally, but not exclusively. There's an African bird called the honeyguide that helps humans find bees' nests. The humans get the honey, while the birds feast on the wax left behind (the honeyguides were first formally described after they were witnessed eating some candles). Now, new research shows that the birds can specifically respond when a human makes a call that indicates they're interested in finding honey."

The people who gather honey in the area inhabited by honeyguides have their own call to indicate when they're ready to go on the hunt. Researchers describe it as "a loud trill followed by a grunt: 'brrrr-hm.'" The honey hunters told researchers that they'd learned this call socially—their parents or other family members typically taught it to them. So the researchers decided to test whether it was effective.

The authors suspect that honeyguides learn to respond to the call by observing the success of their peers. Juvenile honeyguides, which look somewhat different, are mistaken for a different species by the people who gather honey, largely because they don't respond to the humans' requests for help.

According to a report in Tech Times by Alyssa Navarro, "With the help of a wax-eating bird species known as greater honeyguides, humans are able to find the nests of bees and harvest honey, a new study suggests. It's a rare kind of mutualism and cooperation between humans and free-living wild animals."

Thanks to the work of ethnobiologist Hussein Isack, it has long been known that both honeyguides and humans team up to find wild bee nests, which offers them an invaluable resource for calorie-rich food. Honeyguides perform a special call to attract the attention of humans and then fly from tree to tree to signal the direction of the bees' nest.

Claire Spottiswoode, an evolutionary biologist from Cambridge, found that there is a two-way communication between honeyguides and humans. The wild birds can respond and adapt to the signals given by humans who seek their collaboration — a reciprocal relationship.