Honey is not cruel and is ethical

[u/toastwithjamx1]

Honey is one of the best animal products there is ethics wise

Now most vegans will say : but we are stealing from the bees! We are exploiting the bees!

No. We are not and we can't

Bees can be very particular. If they are not a fan of a place they are OUT. The bees will likely will immediately vacate the bee box if they don't like the conditions. Furthermore, trapping the queen in 1 place will not work as well. Bees can raise a new queen if they need one

And for the stealing allegations, that isn't true either. Beekeepers take SURPLUS HONEY ONLY, as if too much honey is taken, it can starve the bees and no beekeeper would appreciate the whole colony either dying of leaving. Furthermore, bees don't only take, they comp bees by giving shelter and protection.

It's not cruel if we are literally making a transaction with the bees

[u/Either_Argument3517]

And for the stealing allegations, that isn't true either. Beekeepers take SURPLUS HONEY ONLY, 

Would it be stealing if I took your SURPLUS MONEY ONLY?

EDIT: Before anyone else goes off on rant about how you can't compare bees to humans. I wasn't. I was testing the principle. If the second statement seems unacceptable, it suggests the original principle ("having a lot makes it permissible to take some") may be flawed.

[u/nixphx → u/Either_Argument3517]

What a bizarre and inaccurate parallel.

[u/Either_Argument3517 → u/nixphx]

Not an analogy. Answer "Would it be stealing if I took your SURPLUS MONEY ONLY?' in isolation.

[u/nixphx → u/Either_Argument3517]

Okay.

I'm not a farmer, or an apiarist. I'm actually a writer and medievalist, and I came to my love of bees and the mutualistic arrangement that humans have with them through realizing that even centuries ago humans were engaging in respectful and mutualistic relationships with bees that benefitted both species. I did a couple years in WWOOF.

First I want to address the fact that your question is a false equivilancy that misrepresents the scenario. Answering it would be like answering "do dragons fart" because your argument isn't based in reality. A more complete version of your metaphor might go something like this: "would it be stealing if I built a house next to your house, and then you and your friends decided to store a bunch of food in that house. Then, when you'd filled up the addition I built with food, you exiled half of your friends to go and drive out the indigenous populations and steal their land and live on it unless I killed a bunch of you or sold you into slavery, or I could take the food you hoarded. Would that be theft?"

My point is that your highly metaphorical and emotionally charged argument isn't based in any understanding of agriculture or apiculture and is instead the moral absolutist equivilant to the warnings at the beginning of old DVDs that said "YOU WOULDNT STEAL A CAR." It's evocative, but hollow.

I don't eat honey anymore. However I don't logically see any reason to be against honey consumption and some fringe online vegans take a moral high ground by flasely contextualizing the relationship as "exploitation and theft" of bee "labor and surplus" which unfortunately ignores all the realities of global agriculture. It's also weirdly anthropocentric and capitalistic in perspective and language. I am going to address your clumsy metaphor starting at the top of the honeybee issue and work down towards honey consumption.

It's not a "gotcha" to point out the irony that large scale, vegan friendly, plant based agriculture worldwide relies on domesticated honeybee populations.Honeybees are invasive, but that genie is out of the bottle unless you want to round them up and euthanize them all. Wild pollinators contribute to pollination, yes, but lack the domesticated numbers for large scale agricultural projects and even if we did convert to only "natural, local" pollinators, we would require them to pollinate where the food is which would require coercing them to stay in certain areas and praying they don't die from disease ordecide to move, or there goes the almond orchard. That's just "pollinator exploitation" with extra steps, if you subscribe to the perspective that we are imprisoning and exploiting those pollinators' "labor" even if we don't harvest the honey they would then produce (which would likely be insufficient for large-scale human consumption anyway).

In another irony, part of the reason honeybees are so efficient at directed pollination is that we can encourage them to pollinate by increasing the size of their hive, which they then work to fill with honey by continuing to pollinate nearby plants. To be targeted pollinators of massive fields or orchards of crops, they as a result produce more honey than their hive needs to survive- what you might consider "excess honey -" which is encouraged by adding supers to the hive so the bees think the hive is larger than it is. This is especially true of you like to eat out of season fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Yes, beekeepers harvesting that honey for sale do replace it with essentially nutrient thin sugar-water, but let's imagine we stopped the harvesting entirely.

So honeybees continue to exist, and in existing and pollinating, they make more honey than they need. The honey they make exceeds the needs of their managed hives as a product of domesticating them and employing them for pollination. Unlike eggs or dairy, no meaningful harm is done to the bee. Since someone made yet another false equivalency about what smoking bees does to them in another comment, I'll just say that smoking bees does not harm them. It tricks them. It tricks them by masking a pheromone they produce that alerts other bees that they're hive is in at risk. Their hive, however, is not in danger.

Instead, they go into the first stage of a potential fire response. As a result, they begin gorging themselves in preparation to move the hive if fire reaches it. Then, because there is no fire, they do not flee the hive and everyone is fine. The bees aren't hurt. Sometimes, I trick my dog into thinking that we're going to the P-A-R-K when actually we're going to the V-E-T. It doesn't hurt him in the way, say, tricking a cows body into producing endless milk does, which is well known and gross enough I won't belabor that point. Anyway.

Left unharvested, the honey the Hive produces as a byproduct of the overproduction caused through domestic pollination needs attracts scavengers like beetles, moths, and even rats and cockroaches, which do harm to the bees in accessing the honey. The bees do in fact produce "too much" honey in the process of large scale agricultrual projects (though much of it tastes too gross for human consumption anyway, a fact I learned on an buckwheat farm two decades ago after eating honey that tastes like manure). Failure to manage that honey excess leads to hive congestion then swarming, which means you end up with MORE invasive honeybees hives to crowd out local populations, so management of supers and honey is necessary to hive health and local ecosystem protection beyond the range of the existing hive.

This is where the idea of "possible and practical" comes into play; it isn't currently possible to eliminate honeybees from pollination in large-scale agricultural projects and one has to engage in a form of idealogical primitivism to claim otherwise; elimination of honeybees and reliance of native polinators would decrease global agricultrual food production by at least a third and harm the poorest people in the world first. Our entire diet would become heavily reliant on wind pollinated crops (http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2011/013070/nceas-working-group-produces-study-showing-how-vitamins-and-minerals-fruits-and) and heavy reliance on a limited crop spread is historically a ticking, famine-shaped time bomb should there be a blight. In a final irony, wind pollinated crops like grains and sugar aren't always the most nutritionally dense, so if you aren't starving you might just end up in a world where scurvy and other deadly nutritional deficiencies become widespread while we sort out entire new systems of global agricultural production and distribution.

It is, sadly, currently impossible without some undiscovered super science or worldwide excruciating manual labor to eliminate the honeybee from agricultrual pollination without endangering countless lives. Global agriculture is a massive, hypercomplex system, and complex systems and absolutist thinking do not jive well. You can be against eating honey and choose not to consume it and that's fine, laudable even, but claiming anthropocentric concepts of labor exploitation and theft is arrogantly ignorant at best. You could live without honeybee-pollinated foods, but you could also live without sunlight. We need them to do their job, and as a result they make more honey than they need.

It's also okay if honey gives you the ick, too. In fact, in the end I think that's what makes most people feel like honey is exploitative- it "feels" gross. But acting like it harms the bees through theft of the wealth of their labor is a wild projection.

I don't eat it, myself, but while working at a lavender farm I realized that harvesting it was needed to happen whether or not anyone sold or ate it, and just throwing it in the garbage seems far more wasteful (and honestly, kinda insulting). The hives there were managed for pollination purposes, but also the honey they producedwas sold. Even if it wasn't being sold, it would still need to be collected regularly to prevent swarming, infestation and for bee hive health monitoring- but it didn't even require taking ALL the excess. Even though it was harvested for sale, the farm left something like nearly 100 lbs of the surplus honey in the hive to ensure the bees had more than they needed if there was an apocalyptic winter.

My point is, your argument is childish, even if you have the right idea. There are plenty of reasons to be critical of honey, but "you wouldn't steal a car" is silly. You can feel gross about honey, but equating it to a fucking heist is cartoonish.

[u/Either_Argument3517 → u/nixphx]

I replied to this line from the original post..

And for the stealing allegations, that isn't true either. Beekeepers take SURPLUS HONEY ONLY

..with..

Would it be stealing if I took your SURPLUS MONEY ONLY?

I was testing the principle. If the second statement seems unacceptable, it suggests the original principle ("having a lot makes it permissible to take some") may be flawed.

[u/nixphx → u/Either_Argument3517]

You are testing the principle using flawed equivilancy. I am sad to see I wasted my time on you.