Honey, Bees, and Pollination

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Context

This article addresses several aspects of honey as it relates to veganism and animal rights, including whether honey is vegan and how we might handle the topic in conversations.

Is Honey Vegan?

The question of whether honey is vegan is frequently brought up by those new to or considering veganism. According to the most widely accepted definition of veganism, and the definition embraced by JFA, honey is implicitly proscribed.

The definition is "veganism is a way of living that seeks to exclude, as far as possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of and cruelty to animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose."

Considering the information presented below, it would be hard to deny that bees are exploited and harmed when the honey they have made for themselves is taken from their hives for human consumption, or when they are used for pollination. In addition, honey provides no essential nutrients that can't easily be found elsewhere.

Advocacy

Less clear and more nuanced than the question of whether honey is vegan, is how we should respond to inquiries about honey. Discussions about honey should be done with a sensitivity to these facts:

1. Insects rank low, if they register at all, on society's hierarchy of concern for animals.
2. Commercial bees may have been used to pollinate some of the fruits and vegetables that we eat.

In light of this awareness, one way to respond is as follows:

• State that vegans avoid honey because it involves harming bees, then briefly describe how bees are harmed (see below).
• Explain that commercial bees are not necessary for pollination, and may actually be harmful to sustainability (see below).
• Invite your interlocuter to research both sides of the issue then decide for themselves.
• Point out that if they still feel after researching the topic that it's OK to eat honey, it would be illogical to use that as a justification for eating other animal products, or as a justification to dismiss other aspects of veganism as invalid.
• If called for, explain that avoiding honey is not inconsistent or hypocritical just because we may be eating plant-based foods that have been pollinated with commercial bees. We avoid animal products as far as "possible and practicable." Just because we can't be perfect does not mean we should not do what can easily be done—avoiding honey.

Fact Sheet

Harm to Bees

• Farmed bees die in the production of honey and as a result of being used for pollination. One national survey conducted in the United States showed that "the nation’s beekeepers lost 40% of their commercial honey bee colonies" to parasites, pests, and diseases in one 12 month period. On the other hand, wild bees are doing well.

• An article in Scientific American suggests that commercial bees live a hard life and are prone to disease because they are treated with chemicals, exposed to pesticides, endure harsh transportation, and suffer nutritional deficiencies as a result of being shipped to mono-crop areas.

• Queen bees are often killed and replaced after living half of their natural lifespan to "prevent swarming, aggression, mite infestation, and to keep honey production at a maximum."

• Queens are artificially inseminated in a process that kills the male.

• Much of the bees' honey is replaced by sugar water which lacks the nutritional richness of their natural diet.

Sustainability of Beekeeping

• Jonas Geldmann from Cambridge University states that "honeybee hives aren't natural, and they don't help the environment. In fact, they may harm it." He adds that "the way we're managing honeybees, in these hives, has nothing to do with nature conservation

• Commercial honeybees, which have high rates of parasitic disease, are killingwild honeybees.

• Rachael Winfree, an associate professor of entomology at Rutgers University, concludes that 90% of the farms in the area she studied would be OK without commercial honeybees, "because wild bees serve as a backup plan from the ecosystem.”

• The use of the single-species imported honeybee is competing for pollen with and crowding out the over 4,000 species of wild bees just in the United States. This creates an ever-increasing dependence on commercial bees which are more susceptible to disease than wild bees, making the sustainability of commercial bees questionable.

Bee Sentience and Cognition

• The wiggle dance of bees involves highly complex cognitive tasks, and is so sophisticated it requires vector calculus to model. In addition, bees adjust their flight pattern in real time to accommodate the change in the sun's angle of one degree every four minutes.

• Bees also have cognitive abilities not associated with their wiggle dance. Bees can be taught how to perform tasks and can improve on the tasks they have learned by making generalizations. As one researcher put it, "The old-fashioned view is if an animal has a small brain, it’s not intelligent or smart…our study shows it’s not true that small brains are not capable of this kind of cognitive flexibility.”

• Studies show that bees feel pain. The one study that did not conclude bees feel pain depended on injured bees choosing bitter-tasting morphine over sugar water, as if the bees had pharmacological knowledge that even a human would not have without a label.

General Information

• Honey is not vegan according to the most popular definition of veganism, because it involves exploitation and harm to animals, and honey can easily be avoided.

• In the United States, there are about 30 billion managed bees in 2.7 million colonies, with more than half of the colonies shipped to the Central Valley to pollinate almond trees, which have only a five-day pollination window.

• Bees are hard workers. "A bee visits 50 to 100 flowers per trip to take nectar and pollen to the hive. In her lifetime, about six to eight weeks, a worker bee will produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey. Thousands of bees in a hive fly more than 55,000 miles and visit about 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey—about the amount one American will consume in a year."

See Also

Article: Are U.S. Honeybees Sustainable?

Video (6:21): Why Vegans Don't Eat Honey

Transcript Why Vegans Don't Eat Honey

Transcript for "Why Vegans Don't Eat Honey" (auto generated)

Of all the animal products that vegans don't consume, honey is the one that seems the most confusing. So why is it that vegans don't consume honey from an ethical perspective?

Bees have a brain and nervous system and have been shown to demonstrate emotions and even exhibit pessimism, which is a significant sign of intelligence. In the commercial honey industry however, there are several unethical practices that are carried out on bees, including instrumental insemination where typically between 8 to 12 drones are crushed to death and have their semen extracted from them.

The queen bee is then restrained and has the semen injected inside of her. The queen bee will often either have one or both of her wings clipped, which is done as a means of identifying the queen bee but also to prevent swarming—which is where a single bee colony will split into two or more distinct colonies. This is seen as bad for business as it reduces the honey production from that hive.

It is normal for queen bees to be purchased online as well and you can buy them with their wings clipped and have them posted to your house. Furthermore when the hives have been harvested for the honey they are often cold for the winter as it is cheaper to kill off the entire hive than it is to make sure they have food during the winter months. Bee farmers will often cull hives who aren't displaying the right temperament as well.

There are a number of ways that beekeepers will cull bee colonies which include sealing off the hive and then pouring petrol into it or drowning them with soapy water or gassing them to death with carbon dioxide. Alternatively some beekeepers will trap the bees in large industrial bin bags which are then left in the sun to ensure the bees either suffocate to death or die due to the increasingly high temperatures in the bag.

Sometimes beekeepers won't cull the entire hive but will instead depopulate a certain number of bees or kill the queen. ("I'm gonna kill her right now.) and even when hives are not cold it is not uncommon for bee farmers to lose a significant percentage of their hives due to factors such as poor insulation, not enough food, or parasites.

Honey is a bee's food, It is produced when they swallow nectar, regurgitate it, and then repeat this process many times. It takes about 12 worker bees an entire lifetime to create a single teaspoon of honey.

However, because we take the honey, if the bees are not cold they will be given a sugar syrup which is devoid of many of the essential aspects of the honey that the bees require to be healthy. Couple this with the fact that honey bees are selectively bred—meaning that the population gene pool is narrowed and they are consequently at a significantly higher risk of diseases and large-scale die-offs.

Furthermore, honeybee hives are regularly traded locally and internationally—often shipped in packaging boxes which allows the rapid spread of diseases and parasites such as deformed wing virus and varroa mites. "This eventually destroys a hive because it weakens the immune system of the bees and it makes them more vulnerable to stress and disease." These pathogens can affect wild bumblebee populations and spread between wild bee species when the honeybees visit the same flower.

But don't we need to eat honey because bee populations are in decline? It's no secret that bee populations are in decline across the world, but in the past 50 years the honeybee population has increased by 45 percent. So is the honey industry actually helping? The UK as an example is home to around 270 bee species. Honey bees being but one of these species can actively harm wild bee populations because they compete directly for nectar and pollen—meaning that wild bees can be out competed.

Initiatives such as urban beekeeping put more pressure on wild bees and worsen the decline. It is important for natural ecosystems that there are a variety of pollinators as different pollinators will pollinate different plants.

Honeybees are extremely efficient at collecting pollen and returning it to their hives but as a consequence they transfer little to the flowers that they visit. They are measurably less effective at pollination than wild bees and when honey bees occur in high numbers they can push wild bees out of an area, making it harder for wild plants to reproduce.

This is a huge problem because a lack of wildflowers is one of the main factors behind the decline in wild bee populations, and on top of that the industry most responsible for habitat destruction including wildlands and wildflowers is the animal farming industry.

Experts at the department of zoology at Cambridge University have previously stated that the crisis in global pollinator decline has been associated with one species above all—the western honeybee.

Honeybees are artificially bred agricultural animals similar to livestock such as pigs and cows, but this livestock animal can roam beyond any enclosure to disrupt local ecosystems through competition and disease. The honeybee does not help wildlife.

Western honeybees are a commercially managed species that can actually have negative effects on their immediate environment through the massive numbers in which they are introduced. Ultimately the production of honey has serious ethical concerns, and from an environmental perspective is contributing to the very problem that many of us think we are helping by purchasing honey in the first place.

If we really want to protect wild bees we should focus on creating wildflower meadows and using our outdoor spaces more effectively in order to maximize the pollinator potential of the natural world. The best way we can do this is by adopting a vegan lifestyle and repurposing land that is currently used for animal agriculture.

As the most comprehensive study that's ever been conducted on farming's impact on the environment concluded that we could free up to 75 of current agricultural land by switching to a plant-based diet, which would allow us to re-wild and create vibrant carbon sinks full of wildflowers and rich biodiversity. Now that's a lot of land and potential for wild bees and pollinators.

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HONEY, BEES, AND POLLINATION.
(This and other fact sheets can be found at justiceforanimals.org/?curid=194, your vegan and animal rights wiki.)

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The page was originally authored by Greg.Fuller but may have been edited since.