We had our monthly D&D game with some friends, and, as it usually happens, various issues around my veganism cropped up; a friend was making a curry sauce that called for honey (my friend kindly made me a vegan version using maple syrup instead) and naturally, the question of “What’s wrong with honey?” cropped up among our players.
I tried making the typical vegan animal cruelty case – at least some bees are inevitably killed in harvesting honey, we have plant-based substitutes that don’t involve the use of animals…the usual cases.
Of course, folks hearkened back to friends and family who raised bees themselves in small family farm, bee husbandry operations, where, perhaps unsurprisingly, bees were “never” killed.
Now then, we know this isn’t actually the case: just because beekeepers in small collectives or small bee farm operations may take extra care to minimize animals killed, it hardly makes any reasonable sense to claim that bees are NEVER killed even in these harvest conditions. Of course bees are killed. Bee husbandry isn’t being done for the benefit of bees; it’s being done for the collection of honey for profit. The lives of any individual bees are not even a secondary concern; maximizing profit is the issue.
…Because bees are seen flying free, they are also often considered free of the usual cruelties of the animal farming industry. However bees undergo treatments similar to those endured by other farmed animals. They go through routine examination and handling, artificial feeding regimes, drug and pesticide treatment, genetic manipulation, artificial insemination, transportation (by air, rail and road) and slaughter.
http://www.vegansociety.com/animals/exploitation/bees.php
Source: T. Hooper, …Guide to Bees and Honey, Blandford, 1991
Of course, the larger issue is that a majority of honey produced for sale isn’t even coming from small “family” farming operations; it’s coming from the honeybee equivalent of the dairy, beef, and chicken factory farm.
Factory farmed bees suffer many of the same abuses and exploitation as any other factory farmed animal, from transport in suboptimal conditions (leading to significant numbers of animals killed) to bees killed during harvest, or arbitrarily killing the queen of a given hive to stimulate hives that are less commercially useful. Couple this with the fact that honey is one of the EASIEST animal products to actually avoid: there’s no nutritional requirement for humans to eat honey at all, and vegan substitutes like Agave nectar are readily available, and looks and tastes so much like honey that there’s simply no good reason not to use it.
Fundamentally, animals are simply not an exploitable resource; we have alternatives. A quick five-second Google search on typical honey production practices yields the following:
…Unite weak colonies. Select the best queen of two colonies. Kill the less desirable queen…
http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G7601
…Basically what you are doing are forcing your bees into a population “explosion” without letting them get into a swarming mode…
…The most common pesticide kill is to adult bees. The beekeeper may find a large number of dead bees in front of the bee hives in the apiary. On occasions the beekeeper may observe bees on leafs that seem to be drunk. Chemicals generally affect the nervous system so that bees have trouble flying, walking, or remaining upright.
http://www.beeclass.com/dts/201lessonten.htm
…Mail-order queens are usually available by the last week in March. Queens should be replaced if their brood production is lower than average. To requeen a colony, find, kill and discard the old queen, then introduce the new queen in her cage as described in the section…
http://www.ent.uga.edu/Bees/Get_Started/Honey_Bee_Management.htm
babble 