Group Description

Bee-eaters are a delight to watch and to photograph. For their color, grace and variety, bee-eaters merit their own small group on Flickr. For our Bee-eaters of the World: A Field Guide, a few simple rules:

1. Bee-eaters only please.
2. Use the English common name, Latin (scientific) binomal, or both in your tags. ##
3. Indicate where you took the photo -- the nation at the minimum, a geotag if possible.

## Names are needed since we will index all the species (and perhaps later, subspecies). If you're not sure, please add the tag "idpending." I'll do my best to help with the ID.


From Wikipedia:
The bee-eaters are a group of near passerine birds in the family Meropidae. Most species are found in Africa but others occur in southern Europe, Madagascar, Australia and New Guinea. They are characterised by richly coloured plumage, slender bodies and usually elongated central tail feathers. All are colorful and have long downturned bills and pointed wings, which give them a swallow-like appearance when seen from afar.

As the name suggests, bee-eaters predominantly eat flying insects, especially bees, wasps, which are caught in the air by sallies from an open perch. While they will pursue any type of flying insect, honey bees predominate in their diet. The world range of the bee-eaters is nearly identical to the native world range of the four most common species of honey bees. Fry et al. say "in 20 separate studies of the diet of 16 kinds of bee-eaters, Hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps) comprised from 20% to 96% of all insects eaten, and honey bees formed on average about one-third of the Hymenoptera". [Fry, Fry and Harris, Kingfishers, Bee-eaters and Rollers (1992) ISBN 0-7136-1410-8]

Before eating its meal, a bee-eater removes the sting by repeatedly hitting the insect on a hard surface. During this process, pressure is applied to the insect thereby extracting most of the venom. Notably, the birds only catch prey that are on the wing and will ignore flying insects once they land.

Bee-eaters are gregarious. They form colonies by nesting in burrows tunneled into the side of sandy banks, such as those which have collapsed on the edges of rivers. Their eggs are white and they generally produce 2-9 eggs per clutch (depending on species), which are widely distributed and common. As they live in colonies, large numbers of these holes are often seen together, white streaks from their accumulated droppings accentuating the entrances to the nests. Most of the species in the family are monogamous, and have biparental care of the young.

The bee-eater family consists of two subfamilies - the bearded bee-eaters Nyctyornithinae (raised to family level as Nyctyornithidae by Charles Sibley in later versions of his computerised world list), and Meropinae, the typical bee-eaters.