This myth is admittedly a tough one for most folks to discard, and indeed honey was one of the last animal-based foods I stopped eating before finally going vegan. After all, I thought at the time, we humans aren’t slaughtering bees to eat them; we are only eating their excess honey — honey that they calmly & willingly give us. Ahhh, if only this were true … Of course, it isn’t.

Please consider the following little-known facts:

*FACT: Even though we have been taught that they are “only insects”, James Gould (professor of ecology at Princeton University) and Carol Gould (professor of evolutionary biology, also at Princeton) noted that “Honey bees are at the top of their part of the evolutionary tree … To look at honeybees, then, is to see one of the most elegant solutions to the challenges of life on our planet” … Martin Giurfa noted in his 2001 study that bees are capable of abstract thinking and also able to distinguish their immediate family members from other bees in their hive … Fred Dyer noted (in The Journal of Experimental Biology) that bees use real-time visual cues to map their travels … Judith Reinhard and her team of researchers noted in a 2004 study that, similar to the way that smells invoke powerful memories for humans, specific odors also trigger memories in bees … Finally, independent studies done by Balderrama & Núñez both showed conclusively that bees do indeed feel pain when harmed … What all this research boils down to, my Friends, is that regardless of what you may think about their level of intelligence, bees are quite clearly much more than “mere insects”. What this research collectively shows is that bees are sentient, that bees are conscious and that bees are capable of suffering when frightened, harmed or killed.

*FACT: Despite what we have been taught, most honeybees are not kept in idyllic, small-farm or backyard hives, but rather are almost exclusively enslaved in far larger, far more callous operations. Indeed, as a result of pesticide-related diseases and man-caused climate shifts, the world’s honeybee population has been nearly decimated over the past several decades. And yet the demand for honey has remained so high that these tiny animals have become primarily factory-farmed — much like chickens, pigs, and cows.

*FACT: Bees are greatly harmed during the honey farming process … First of all, even though queen bees can naturally live as long as five years, bee farmers maximize their honey production by killing their queens off and replacing them every two years (sometimes even yearly). These “replacement queens” almost invariably come from commercial queen suppliers — essentially puppy mills for bees … In addition, many of the larger bee farmers purposefully kill off entire hives during the winter months; murdering hundreds of thousands of healthy bees merely to maximize the subsequent honey production in newer hives … Bee farmers also use smoke when working with their bees — which makes the bees passive, by forcing them to gorge themselves on their own honey … Also, when collecting honey, even the most careful bee farmers end up injuring, dismembering, squashing or otherwise killing many bees.

The argument is often made that we humans are only taking the surplus honey that bees don’t want or don’t need, and yet this is also untrue … Commercial bee farms (again, where the vast majority of your store-bought honey comes from) frequently remove ALL all their hives’ fall-season honey, and then either feed their bee colonies sugar syrup over the winter or let them die off completely.   And it is also common for ALL bee honey operations to take ALL of a hive’s spring-season “crop” as well, forcing those bees to work in “sweat-shop” fashion over the summer months to replenish their suddenly depleted stores of food for their coming winter — stores that will then again be stolen by the bee farmer, whereupon the process of enslavement starts all over again.

In conclusion, then, while it might reasonably be stated that the harms suffered by honey bees pale in comparison to the tortured lives of farmed chickens, farmed pigs & farmed cows, there is no doubt that farmed honey bees ARE deeply harmed & that farmed honey bees DO suffer greatly. There is absolutely no sweetener of any kind that is patently necessary for humans to ingest in order to live long & healthy lives, and numerous plant-based sweeteners are becoming easy to find. As such, since honey causes suffering and eating honey is completely unnecessary, we should all choose to sweeten our lives with something other than the stress & suffering of others.

 

Current status of this Myth: Refuted
Justification it provides for eating animals: NONE

Filed under: Minimizing the Myths of Meat by Scaughdt