It’s definitely not a ‘honey’ and it’s not much of a badger either. While it may belong to the same family of mammals as ‘regular’ badgers, the honey badger doesn’t really look like one.
Anatomically, it’s much closer to a weasel or a polecat.
This feisty, cocksure carnivore is found across much of Africa, Southwest Asia and India, where it’s renowned as one of nature’s badasses. Famed for their strength, tenacity and toughness, honey badgers will pick a fight with seemingly any animal, of any size, and win, much of the time.
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They actively attack scorpions, pythons and venomous snakes. When threatened, they’ll scrap with and see off large predators such as leopards, lions and hyenas. They’ll also go for horses, cattle and Cape buffalo, if the animals mess with their burrows.
This is particularly impressive for an animal that’s not much taller than a toaster. Adults are about a metre (3ft) long, with a broad white stripe that runs from head to tail, but they’re thickset and chunky. They have teeth that can crush bone and jaws that can split tortoise shells.
With long, powerful foreclaws you could say the animal resembles Freddy Krueger, but the honey badger wouldn’t care – it literally has some of the thickest skin in the animal kingdom.
The loose skin on the ruff of its neck is 6mm (about 1/4in) deep, which helps it to thrash, twist and squirm its way out of trouble, should it find itself in the grasp of a predator’s jaws. It also enables the animal to shrug off bee stings and porcupine quills, which rarely pierce the honey badger’s skin.
All in all, natural selection seems to have sculpted an animal fine-tuned for fighting and self-defence. The honey badger also has mutations in a key gene which make it immune to the bites of venomous snakes, and a reversible anal pouch which it uses to eject a foul-smelling liquid that can be detected up to 40m (130ft) away.
The scent, which has been described as ‘suffocating’, is used to mark territory, deter predators and calm the bees inside the hives that it raids, which brings us back to its name.
According to folklore, honey badgers are guided to beehives by birds called honeyguides. The badgers break in and eat the larvae. Then the birds get to eat the exposed beeswax.
This is supposedly what gives the badger its name, but sceptics point out that it’s unlikely because honey badgers are primarily active at night, whereas honeyguides fly by day.
A 2023 study countered this view, however. Researchers from the University of Cambridge interviewed around 400 human honey-hunters from across Africa.
While many had never witnessed the two species interacting, around 60 per cent of honey-hunters interviewed from the Hadzabe tribe in Tanzania had. Here, at least, it seems as if badger and bird really do cooperate to get honey and beeswax from hives. So, maybe the honey badger does deserve its name after all.
This article was originally featured in the Q&A section of BBC Science Focus Magazine.
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