Meropidae
The Key to Scientific Names
Legend Overview
Meropidae Bee-eaters
Version: 1.0 — Published March 4, 2020
- Year-round
- Breeding
- Non-breeding
Introduction
Bejeweled in brilliant colors, with central tail streamers or forked tails in many, bee-eaters are perhaps the most graceful aerial insectivores of the Eastern Hemisphere. These are sit-and-wait predators on large flying insects, aptly named given their predilection for wasps and bees, whose stings they extract before ingesting their prey. Bee-eaters prefer savannas and forests where isolated tree perches provide good focal points for their sallying flights, expanding into more open country only where man-made structures (or large animals) provide reliable perches. Many species are colonial cooperative breeders with some of the most complex social lives among birds. They nest in burrows, and the arduous excavation sometimes involves not only the pair but also other helpers.
Habitat
Bee-eaters live in open habitats, usually savanna and forest and woodland edges and clearings; only a few species live in closed-canopy forest.
Diet and Foraging
Bee-eaters specialize on large flying insects, perching on exposed branches and sallying out into open air to chase them as they pass. Only the Blue-headed Bee-eater Merops muelleri forages from low near the ground on insects flying through gaps in understory vegetation. Whereas many species hunt primarily bees and related insects, other bee-eaters take a wider range of flying insects, but they seem most often to have affinity for prey that have defenses against predation by other insectivores.
Breeding
Bee-eaters have highly variable breeding and social systems, ranging from solitary pairs to large colonies with complex family interactions, including cooperative breeding. Bee-eaters nest in tunnels, typically located in vertical earth banks or in the ground, that they excavate themselves. Females lay 2 to 7 eggs. Both sexes engage in nest construction, incubation, and chick provisioning. Bee-eater young hatch naked and helpless after about 20 days of incubation, and they grow to fledging age after about a month in the nest; they are fed by the parents or helpers for a few days after fledging. In the well-studied White-fronted Bee-eater M. bullockoides, helpers (usually birds from the breeding pair’s previous broods) increase the number of young fledged by increasing the amount of food brought to chicks, and parents in need of help at home have been known to sabotage the efforts of independently breeding offspring to recruit them as helpers at the home burrow.
Conservation Status
Only one of 31 species of bee-eaters (3%) faces any immediate conservation threats (1 NT); that species, the Blue-moustached Bee-eater M. mentalis, appears to be undergoing rapid declines in population size associated with the logging of its forest habitat.
Systematics History
Within Coraciiformes, bee-eaters appear to be most closely allied with the motmot/kingfisher/tody and roller/ground-roller groups, although recent studies disagree about the relationships of these three groups with respect to one another (Cracraft 1981, Ericson et al. 2006a, Livezey & Zusi 2007). The most recent interpretation is that Meropidae is sister to all the other Coraciiformes as treated here (Hackett et al. 2008). Within Meropidae, there are several well-supported clades (Marks et al. 2007), including one containing mostly sedentary African species, and one spread across the Old World that includes many migratory species. The forest-dwelling Nyctyornis species appear to be sister to the rest of the family.
Conservation Status
Least Concern |
96.8%
|
---|---|
Near Threatened |
3.2%
|
Vulnerable |
0%
|
Endangered |
0%
|
Critically Endangered |
0%
|
Extinct in the Wild |
0%
|
Extinct |
0%
|
Not Evaluated |
0%
|
Data Deficient |
0%
|
Unknown |
0%
|
Data provided by IUCN (2024) Red List. More information