My dad’s a beekeeper, and I’ve had the (dis)pleasure of helping him with his post-retirement hobby.
He extracts honey after every nectar flow throughout the year. Usually there’s 3-6 of those, depending on how much it’s rained.
Every single winter, he has to feed the bees sugar water and sugar bricks instead of giving them the honey they worked hard to create in the preceding seasons so they don’t die. This practice was the moment I considered beekeeping unethical because he’s robbing the bees of their agency, and controlling their diet. Controlling animals and their behaviors by stealing from them isn’t ethical. It’s placing bees in a permanent subservient state as they keep making more and more and more honey, when in the wild they’d only make as much as they need.
Couple that with how my dad also sets up swarm traps such that when the bees leave and take off from their old hive because it was unsuitable, they’re often re-captured and sent right back to the slave camp.
And let’s not kid ourselves about the quality of beehives. Biological threats like the parasitic varroa mite, hive beetles, ants, moths, and an assortment of other bugs are always on the attack to steal honey. If not caught in time with things like detergent, diatomaceous earth, or gas fumigation, this can destroy an entire box of honey, let alone the hive itself. My dad has to constantly be on the lookout for these threats, and use chemicals that often also impact the bees themselves. So he’s sacrificing some of the hive to save the rest of it. The “high quality accomodation” is a facade.
Then you have to speak about the numerous impacts honeybees have to the surrounding environment, like spreading viruses, hogging resources over other pollinators, fighting other bees, etc. That’s not ethical either, as much as we like to use honeybees to pollinate our own domesticated foods.
Animals of every kind deserve agency, autonomy, control over their behaviors and resources, free movement, and the right to protect themselves. Hobbyist and industrial beekeeping rejects all of this.
My dad’s a beekeeper, and I’ve had the (dis)pleasure of helping him with his post-retirement hobby.
He extracts honey after every nectar flow throughout the year. Usually there’s 3-6 of those, depending on how much it’s rained.
Every single winter, he has to feed the bees sugar water and sugar bricks instead of giving them the honey they worked hard to create in the preceding seasons so they don’t die. This practice was the moment I considered beekeeping unethical because he’s robbing the bees of their agency, and controlling their diet. Controlling animals and their behaviors by stealing from them isn’t ethical. It’s placing bees in a permanent subservient state as they keep making more and more and more honey, when in the wild they’d only make as much as they need.
Couple that with how my dad also sets up swarm traps such that when the bees leave and take off from their old hive because it was unsuitable, they’re often re-captured and sent right back to the slave camp.
And let’s not kid ourselves about the quality of beehives. Biological threats like the parasitic varroa mite, hive beetles, ants, moths, and an assortment of other bugs are always on the attack to steal honey. If not caught in time with things like detergent, diatomaceous earth, or gas fumigation, this can destroy an entire box of honey, let alone the hive itself. My dad has to constantly be on the lookout for these threats, and use chemicals that often also impact the bees themselves. So he’s sacrificing some of the hive to save the rest of it. The “high quality accomodation” is a facade.
Then you have to speak about the numerous impacts honeybees have to the surrounding environment, like spreading viruses, hogging resources over other pollinators, fighting other bees, etc. That’s not ethical either, as much as we like to use honeybees to pollinate our own domesticated foods.
Animals of every kind deserve agency, autonomy, control over their behaviors and resources, free movement, and the right to protect themselves. Hobbyist and industrial beekeeping rejects all of this.