Is honey cruel to bees?

Question

I mean is the extraction of honey cruel to the bees - sorry I am a bit tired!

Answer 1

Yes it is.

Honey is produced by bees as a food source to sustain the hive through dry periods when there are few flowers and then through the winter.

To harvest it bees are gassed and many die from that.Many others try and defend their colony's food supply and attack the bee-keepers.But their stings get caught in the protective suit and they are disemboweled.Yet more bees are crushed by the machine that harvests honey from the comb.

They honey is replaced by sugar water but this is not as ideal a food source as honey and so it often doesn't last the winter which means many commercial bee hives suffer massive population crashes in winter.

The queen of the colony is regular killed and replaced by a younger queen to keep productivity at the top level.The new queen is artificially fertilised with sperm gathered from what the bee-keepers consider to be the 'ideal drone' to produce the best offspring.Chemicals are used to keep the colony clean.

So basically yes it is cruel and nowhere near as natural as it is made out to be.

A final point is that honey is basically bee vomit-why would you want to eat that?

Answer 2

No. Beekeepers, in particular hobby beekeepers, invest far more than the dollar amount that common sense would dictate the bees are worth. And yet we do. Why? Because we love working with the bees.

Now, given, I can't gather nectar, I can't fan it to make honey. So what on earth could I possibly provide?

How about home?
How about defense from marauding wasps. You want to see something cruel, watch the bald face hornets stand at the entrance and kill the bees as they come.
How about food when the years blooms don't provide enough stores to survive a month, let alone the darkness of winter?
How about treatment for the mites that infest and suck the blood from the bees?
How about a new queen when the old one dies, leaving them with no way to raise a new one? Remember - there's only one animal that lives in that hive - it's the colony, not the individual bees that make it up.

And in the fall, who wraps the hive for solar gain? Who stores pollen to feed the bees when their stores drop so low the next generation cannot be raised?

How about removing bees that would otherwise be killed from houses? Or collecting swarms, who want nothing more than a home to settle into and the chance to succeed?

And I get...some honey. I can't take the honey they live on. That would kill the bees. Then I'd need to feed them more anyway. Stealing the honey that gets them through the winter would be a bad deal for them, bad deal for me.

Is honey cruel to bees? No. It's a little cruel to beekeepers, considering how hard we work and how little we actually keep. It is a labor of love, one I look forward to when spring rolls round again.

Answer 3

If nothing must be harmed when harvesting food, then we should all just sit perfectly still until we expire. Do you use motorized transportation? Do you eat food? Do you grow food? If you do any of these things, insects are killed, (or murdered if you rather) to sustain your life. Simply driving a tractor, car, or food truck kills all kinds of insects, not to mention what is killed in the oil removal and transportation process to fuel those vehicles. Organic farms often use much more petroleum than non-organic. Organic beekeepers squish a few bees here and there too.

That someone would even consider that honey is cruel to bees exposes how separated society has become from the process of farming or otherwise obtaining food. Try raising enough food to feed yourself for one week. Then see if you killed anything.

Oh yea, just a nitpick, but the idea that beekeepers poison bees at the end of the season so they don't have to keep them is ignorant of beekeeping as well. A very small colony of bees without equipment sells for about $80. You don't have to kill many colonies to start talking big money.

Answer 4

Bees create a surplus of honey which is not used. The beekeeper takes the surplus honey, and leaves the bees enough to survive the winter with. When you extract honey, you don't do it with the bees in there. All the bees are removed before you leave the hive. Honey contains all the necessary things needed in order to survive, including water.

I have never seen a bee killed by being "gassed." If we did not "gas" them, many bees would be killed. The guard bees emit an alarm pheromone which in turn would make the bees angry and more prone to stinging. When a bee stings, the barb in its stinger sticks into you, killing the bee. The smoke masks the pheromone, therefore saving bees lives!

I just had honey in my tea; does that make me a murder? I think not. The majority of beekeepers try very hard to not kill a bee. Honey is very healthy for a person. It contains high levels of anti-oxidants.

Yes, sometimes queens are grafted or artificially inseminated. Avocados, and many other plants (probably all the fruits and veggies you eat) were grafted at one time or another.

Lastly, as stated before: Without beekeepers, there would not be any feral honey bee colonies. Colony Collapse Disorder, American Foulbrood Disease, European Foulbrood Disease, Varroa Mites, and Trachea Mites have nearly wiped out the population of bees. Beekeepers monitor their hives for signs of these diseases, and treat them accordingly. Bees pollinate nearly everything. Without bees, there would not be livestock. Bees are required to pollinate alfalfa
Here is a short list of plants that need bees. Without beekeepers, taking honey as a reward you can say goodbye to:
melons, raspberries, pumpkins and other squash, cucumbers, eggplants, almonds, apples, tea, sunflower, and many others.

Answer 5

In a sense yes but mostly from the sense of the bees but not all honey being taken is used in bottles some people harvest it because they sometimes survive on it and then they just reach inside of the hide and only take a fraction of the honey and then move on but if the bee stings someone the bee would die.

Answer 6

Perhaps it would be better to ask: Which is more cruel? The beekeeper, who spends time and money making sure the bees are healthy, and takes the excess honey from the hives ...or... the person who has a panic attack because there are bees in his house or yard and calls the exterminator to poison them?

Answer 7

This peta crap is getting me more then a little upset. Most Peta members are fat, lazy Americans with tooooo much time on their hands. Spoiled rich kids that have nothing else to do.

Hell...if you want cruel all you have to do is watch the hives in the late fall. The workers bees force the drones out of the hive, kicking and screaming, to die by the thousands. Where is Peta when this happens...should not Peta protest the worker bees as slave owners and being racist against the drones???

Answer 8

Extracting honey is far less cruel to bees than killing off all the flies and mosquitoes that try to bite me.

I don't like how they murder the bugs that infest the agave and cane fields.

I can live with my insects, the agave farms can't.

(just so you know, bees only live 6 weeks in the summer, working themselves to death, and they are kicked out when they are no longer useful...very cruel)

Answer 9

Bees pollinate 130 food/vegatable crops in the U.S.. There are no wild honey bees any more. The US fruit and veg. industry depend on managed honey bee populations to produce most of the non-grain crops in the U.S.

PETA types can either eat tofu and rice (herbicide/pesticide intensive crops) or educate themselves about how food production, including organic takes place.

Ignorance will be the death of America.

Answer 10

I was just reading about this yesterday, I had the same question.

Apparently, when the bees make the honey, the beekeeper smokes them out, so they escape out. They are not intentionally killed. Then they are given a sugar syrup to replace the lost honey as nourishment. I forgot what website I got this from, but google "how to harvest honey".