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What is honey?
Bees make honey by swallowing nectar from flowers, regurgitating it, adding enzymes (from their saliva), chewing, swallowing, and then repeating the process many times beginning with regurgitation. In his lifetime, a single worker bee many only produce a teaspoon of honey, even though he visited up to 10,000 flowers in a day.
Where is it found?
Honey is used in a wide variety of food products as a sweetener, to make mead (honey-wine), and in personal care products.
Why should I be concerned?
The justifications used for the human exploitation of bees are the same ones that have been used for the exploitation of African Americans, women, and domesticated animals. The vast majority of beeswax is produced on factory-farms, much like the factory-farms for other domesticated animals like cows and chickens. As such, exploitative practices are common. Queen bees are often artificially inseminated on a bee-sized version of the "rape rack". Queen bees' wings are frequently clipped so they cannot swarm to start a new hive. Queens are also frequently killed, on both factory-farms and small backyard operations, for numerous reasons that all essentially boil down to an intent to exert control over the hive. At various points throughout the production cycle, bees are frequently injured and/or killed, intentionally or unintentionally, by beekeepers. If wild bees produced a surplus of honey, the hive would split into two colonies and none would be wasted. But farmed bees are manipulated by the beekeepers to produce a surplus and physically prevented from splitting the hive. A hive needs a supply of honey to sustain itself during the cold winter months, but most beekeepers replace the honey with less-substantive sugar-water or just kill off the hive.
Practices vary widely on smaller farms and many small beekeepers will tell you they treat their bees very well. But still the question remains: How much respect can you have for someone from whom you steal regularly and manipulate for your own benefit?
Bees exist for their own purpose, but we must also recognize their vital role in our own survival. Nearly 75% of all food crops are made possible by pollinators (such as insects, birds, bats and other mammals). Wild or native bees are much more effective pollinators, but their production of other by-products (such as honey and beeswax) is very low, so farmers continue to rely on factory-farmed honeybees for pollination. We need to support the health and stability of native/wild populations of pollinators so that, over time, farmers will be able to rely less on factory-farmed honeybees and more on native/wild pollinators.
Where can I learn more?
For more information, please see the PETA FactSheet Honey: From Factory-Farmed Bees and the essay Why Honey is Not Vegan.
