Vegans eschew all animal products and that includes honey. I've been told that beekeepers are akin to slave owners, we're exploiting the poor bees, stealing their food, and treating them like zoo animals. Sigh.
First, there is a big difference between small local beekeepers and big corporate ones, and thus in the honey produced. Before we opened our borders to global trade in honey, beekeepers were able to make a living by selling honey. With fake honey coming from China (see https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-products/food/1014606-fake-honey-leaves-consumers-in-a-sticky-situation/) it is estimated that anywhere from 30-70% of honey sold in stores is actually fake or real honey adulterated with other sugars and substances. Consequently, fake honey is cheaper than real honey, and the price of honey has dropped so much that beekeepers have adjusted accordingly. Commercial beekeepers (these are big productions with thousands of hives) now make the majority of their money by renting out their bees for pollination services, trucking the hives all over the US and Canada 10 months out of the year, and selling some of the honey on the side as an extra product, but not as the main cash business. Even smaller producers who are trying to make a living exclusively selling bee related products (honey, wax, nucs, queens, etc.) often resort to feeding their bees sugar water to boost honey yields. The sugar water gets mixed in with the real nectar, and it tastes sweet, but it's technically not honey. Also, organic beekeeping is far more expensive than conventional methods, and big companies that advertise "organic" but whose honey is very cheap, should make consumers suspicious. When I see local honey producers whose products regularly stock chain grocery store shelves year round, I ask how many hives they have and by asking some questions I know who is perhaps faking their honey, or increasingly, just buying local honey from other producers and white labelling it as their own. When you purchase other people's honey, you have no idea what it is, I used to love buying honey but I've stopped because I just do not know what I am getting anymore. Low prices and boundless yield make me suspicious.
Local, small time beekeeping operations are not all organic but they can better afford to be. Beekeeping is an expensive, time consuming hobby, but real beekeepers are concerned about their bees and having smaller numbers of hives (2-8) are able to afford organic treatments. Organic here means we use treatments that are from nature and are compounds that are naturally occurring in the hive. We have 3 hives, and the extra cost of organic is well worth it in our minds, but if we had 100 hives, it would be cost prohibitive with the price of honey being what it is now. I have read that with colony collapse, some of these commercial operations are losing more than 50% of their hives over the (short) winter months, but we've been beekeeping for 5 years and we've never lost a colony yet, and I believe it's because we aren't subjecting our bees to stressful pollination services, where all that moving around the country and monocropping for weeks on end contribute to malnutrition and stress within the hives. Commercial operations are less likely to be organic, and in many cases, don't even bother treating their bees but just let them die and purchase new packages in the spring.
For those who think all beekeeping is akin to slavery, think about this: the bees are free to fly and leave the hive at will. If they don't like the hive you provide, they can leave, and I assure you they do: I have a friend who is a fellow beekeeper and when he came back from vacation, he went into his hives and was stunned to find all the bees had left! There was honey in the hive, and no sign of disease (in which case you'd see many dead bees in the box). Bees are choosy: if they don't like the home you've provided because it's situated in a windy area, lacks water, or just lacks forage (it amazes me how many people will position a hive in a place with no food for the bees), the queen and all the bees will fly away. As for "living in the wild", feral honeybee colonies typically live no more than 2 years, but a beekeeper's colonies easily survive decades, with the average queen living 3- 5 years before requeening takes place, again the choice of the bees, not the beekeeper! It's not quite the same for bees that are used in pollination services: they have less opportunity to swarm or otherwise leave. Swarming or abandoning a hive are triggered by weather and other environmental factors. Moving a hive from place to place can eliminate some of those triggers, for instance, by disrupting natural circadian rhythms of the bees. Feral colonies die from mite infestations and other diseases that beekeepers control, Bees have no natural ability to defend themselves from mites, and along with exposure to the weather, mites kill feral colonies all the time, The reason why bees are not endangered is because there are beekeepers.
Honeybees are prolific honey producers and often store more honey than they can eat. Beekeepers only remove surplus honey, and a typical hive is left with about 120 pounds of honey for the winter to feed about 60,000 bees. Most of us also save some of the honey we've extracted to feed in the spring, if needed. We are fortunate that in Western Pennsylvania, our weather allows us to plant a pollinator garden that has continuous nectar and pollen from March to late November, and thus 120 pounds of honey is plenty for our girls. However, I grew up in Manitoba, which is a major honey producing province in Canada, and I can assure you there is nothing for the bees to eat until perhaps May with a hard end in October with the first frost, so even if you leave 200 pounds of honey on the hive, the bees may well still starve by spring. Do beekeepers let their bees starve? Of course not! Just like a parent would rather feed a child a donut to prevent starvation, beekeepers will feed sugar or sugar water (depends on many factors). But ethical ones will never feed sugar water when there is a nectar flow. Those beekeepers are faking the honey for higher yields - and are pushed to do so because they are competing with cheap, fake honey imported from around the world.
Finally, for anyone who eats vegetables, honeybees are known to increase crop yield and we've seen a sizable increase in our vegetables since the bees started working our gardens. The bees benefit and we benefit too. We don't sell our vegetables - we eat what we grow - and more vegetables means more fresh and frozen produce for us to enjoy year round. Vegans who purchase vegetables produced commercially are helping fund those commercial beekeepers again. Since we have bees, we do not use pesticides because that residue is another reason why colonies will suddenly collapse. However, commercial growers spray regularly, although they try to avoid spraying open flowers. A bee doesn't just land on flowers, however, she will also land and rest on leaves, stems, etc. and that is typically how pesticides come into hives. I have had many requests for "pollination services" where I leave a few hives on the farmer's property year round, but when I visit those farms, I always say no when I see spraying equipment. Organic is not the same as "pesticide free". Organic permethrin kills the same number of bees as inorganic permethrin. We also try to plant our gardens to persuade our bees to stay on our property, where they are safe from chemicals.
I wish vegans would think a little further about the food we eat and how inextricably linked all living things are to one another. Tilling the soil to plant lettuce kills millions of living creatures and destroys habitat. Are vegans only concerned about cute mammals? I didn't think so. If we all sourced our food locally, we'd get fresher food, and the economic pressures that push globalization would not be as big a factor. We all have choice. I appreciate the people who support our local farmer's market. They understand a $15 apple pie is not the same as the grocery store $5 pie, or the fresh kale at $3/pound is quite different from the store kale sold at half that price. Same goes for honey. I have seen honey sold at our local supermarket for $2/pound and so long as people do not understand the difference between true local honey and commercial honey, we'll continue to deal with the fake food and the bad industrialization processes. If you really are concerned about the welfare of honeybees and the food supply, you should support local beekeepers.
Disclaimers: Blog posts are opinions, not advice. One thing all beekeepers will agree on, is that if you ask 10 beekeepers what to do, you'll get 13 different answers. Beekeeping is alchemy, nature, and a bit of magic.
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