Waxing lyrical

I hadn't come across this tale from Laurens van der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari. This excerpt has appeared in a new literary book on birds, The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany by Graeme Gibson as reviewed in The Guardian.

... a honey hunter is led by a curiously loud-voiced species called a honeyguide to the location of wild-bees' nests. Eventually, greed causes the hunter not to leave a share of the honey for his bird partner, and the creature takes revenge by guiding the man not to a bee's nest but to a puff adder that bites and kills him.

It is a classic Postian sermon about the dangers of neglecting our dues to the realms of nature. The only problem is that the honeyguide doesn't eat honey. It eats the grub-filled nest and -- most remarkable of all -- the wax comb itself, a substance indigestible to almost all other animals. In other words, the bird-human partnership is a perfect symbiosis. Now there's the stuff of an interesting myth: human desire and nature are at one.