If youre a vegan hearing the same arguments over and over you can just copy paste these ;) if youre a carnist using these pls do us all a favour and just read the whole list get them out of your system https://www.godfist.com/vegansidekick/guide.php
The argument about honey is incorrect at best and deliberately misleading at worst.
Honey is produced by bees so that it can be stored as a food source.
- This is true
On the most fundamental level, it is their property, taking it is theft.
- I suppose this is technically true, but bees do not possess a brain complex enough to understand the concept of ownership.
But beyond this there are a number of ethical issues. The standard practices for retrieving honey involve killing bees by incidentally crushing them.
- This can happen if you’re not careful, but in terms of dangers, the things that bees deal with in the wild are vastly more deadly. Roughly 1000 bees die in a healthy hive, and about 1600 eggs are laid every day
Bees are sprayed to subdue them while accessing the hive.
- A little bit of smoke is typically pumped around a hive which sends the bees in deeper to escape the smell, although I’ve also seen them sprayed with sugar water which they will lick off each other. Neither is harmful.
When honey is stolen, it is then replaced with a syrup alternative, which is not the same as honey, and is essentially depriving the bee of their natural food.
- This is entirely false. Syrup is provided to a hive if the colony did not produce enough honey to sustain themselves for winter. Hives are also left with enough honey to be comfortable(roughly 75 pounds for winters here)
Bee hives are extremely sensitive and opening them up is highly unnatural for the bees, who work to keep a particular atmosphere inside, which gets disrupted.
- Bees in nature will make a hive pretty much anywhere that can offer reasonable protection from predators. More often than not, they will choose to live in the hives we provide over anything else, not only that, but bees can(and sometimes do) just leave a hive to find somewhere else to live.
On top of this, selective inbreeding of bees has weakened the species as a whole, and transportation of bees to places and environments they’d not normally travel to means transportation of diseases that would not normally affect the local population of bees, which is hazardous to bees in general.
- I’m not aware of any scientific consensus on this being true. As a species, we’ve been keeping bees since we developed agriculture and it’s arguable that because humans started keeping bees their species thrived.
It’s a misconception that honey farming is of benefit to the overall bee population.
- This is also false. Honey-producing bees make up less than 10% of the overall bee population and it’s likely even that high because honey farming is a thing people do.
bees dont labour to produce excess for themselves so that you can enjoy it. You dont have to understand the concept of ownership for it to be unethical to steal from someone. Hence why the phrase “taking candy from a baby” is a cliche cartoon villain phrase. Does a baby understood the relationship of someone to an object that is exclusive right to retention and destruction? probably not but do they understand they like their stuff that they like and theyre sad when its taken away? And you dont get off if the bees in theory dont notice what is taken because then you are still forcing them to essentially work overtime for no benefit to themselves, you are breeding a slave species that exists to spend 90% of their lives producing excess for someone else non consensually
I feel like we’re arguing 2 different things.
My original point is not “It’s 100% ethical to keep bees and take their honey” (although I personally believe that keeping bees is a lot more ethical than farming mammals and birds)
My argument is that the evidence the article presents as to why beekeeping is bad is largely untrue and is presented in a way that will mislead people.
That’s a very long and round-about way of completely missing the point. You do not require honey in order to live, therefore you have no justifiable excuse to abuse and interfere with bees. They are not yours to own and control. Leave them alone.
“they die naturally so it’s okay to kill them” and “I’m ignorant to science but am going to rebute with an assumption” are what I expect from apologists, yet I’m still somehow let down.
