Don't Eat Honey

It's the worst animal product to eat by far!

(I think this is a pretty important article so I’d appreciate you sharing and restacking it—thanks!)

There are lots of people who say of themselves “I’m vegan except for honey.” This is a bit like someone saying “I’m a law-abiding citizen, never violating the law, except sometimes I’ll bring a young boy to the woods and slay him.” These people abstain from all the animal products except honey, even though honey is by far the worst of the commonly eaten animal products.

Now, this claim sounds outrageous. Why do I think it’s worse to eat honey than beef, eggs, chicken, dairy, and even foie gras? Don’t I know about the months-long torture process needed to fatten up ducks sold for foie gras? Don’t I know about the fact that they grind up baby male chicks in the egg industry and keep the females in tiny cages too small to turn around in? Don’t I know, don’t I know, don’t I know?

Indeed I do. I am no fan of these animal products. I fastidiously avoid eating them. In fact, I think that factory farming is a horror of unprecedented proportions, a crime, a tragedy, an embarrassment, a work of Satan himself that induces both cruelty and wickedness in those involved and perpetrates suffering on a scale so vast it can scarcely be fathomed. I can be accused of many things, but being a fan of most animal products is not one of them.

But I assure you, honey is worse (at least in expectation).

If you eat a kilogram of beef, you’ll cause about an extra 2 days of factory farming. It’s 3 days for pork, 14 for turkey, 23 for chicken, and 31 for eggs. In contrast, if you eat a kg of honey, you’ll cause over 200,000 days of bee farming. Of all the farming years brought about by the honey, chicken, cow, sheep, turkey, duck, pig, and goat farming industries, 97% have been brought about by honey (though it’s comparable to numbers of shrimp, farmed fish, and farmed insects).

If honey is bad, therefore, it is likely to be very bad! If we assume a day of bee life is only .1% as bad in absolute terms as a day of chicken life, honey is still many times worse than eating chicken (at least, if you eat similar amounts). As we’ll see, taking into account serious estimates of suffering caused makes honey seem many times worse than all other animal products, so that your occasional honey consumption could very well be worse than all the rest of your consumption of animal products combined.

Let’s first establish that bees in the honey industry do not live good lives. First of all, their lives are very short. They live just a few weeks. They die painfully. So even putting aside grievous industry abuse, their lives aren’t likely to be great. Predation, starvation, succumbing to disease, and wear and tear are all common.

Second of all, the honey industry treats bees unimaginably terribly (most of the points I make here are drawn from the Rethink Priorities essay I just linked). They’re mostly kept in artificial, conditions, in mechanical structures that are routinely inspected in ways that are very stressful for the bees, who feel like the hive is under attack. Often, the bees sting themselves to death. In order to prevent this, the industry uses a process called smoking—lighting a fire, sending smoke into the hives, to prevent alarm pheromones from being detected and the bees from being (beeing) sent into a frenzy. Sometimes, however, smoking melts the wings of the bees (though my sense is this is somewhat rare). Reassembly of the hive after inspections often crushes bees to death.

These structures, called Langstroth hives, also have poor thermal insulation, increasing the risk of bees freezing to death or overheating. About 30% of hives die off during the winter, meaning this probably kills about 8 billion bees in the U.S. alone every single year. The industry also keeps the bees crammed together, leading to infestations of harmful parasites.

Oftentimes, beekeepers take too much honey and leave all of the bees to starve to death. This is a frequent cause of the mass bee die-offs that, remember, cause about a third of bee colonies not to survive the winter. Because beekeepers take honey, the bees main source of food, bees are left chronically malnourished, leading to higher risk of death, weakness, and disease. Bees in the commercial honey industry generally lack the ability to forage, which exacerbates nutrition problems.

Bees also undergo unpleasant transport conditions. More than half of bee colonies are transported at some point. Tragically, “bees from migratory colonies have a shorter lifespan and higher levels of oxidative stress than workers at stationary apiaries.” The transport process is very stressful for bees, just as it is for other animals. It also weirdly leads to bees having underdeveloped food glands, perhaps due to vibration from transport. Transport often is poorly ventilated, leading to bees overheating or freezing to death. Also, transport brings bees from many different colonies together, leading to rapid spread of disease.

Honey bees are often afflicted by parasites, poisoned with pesticides, and killed in other ways. Queen bees are routinely killed years before they’d die naturally, have their wings clipped, and are stressfully and invasively artificially inseminated. This selective breeding leaves bees more efficient commercially but with lower welfare levels than they’d otherwise have. Often bees are killed intentionally in the winter because it’s cheaper than keeping them around—by diesel, petrol, cyanide, freezing, drowning, and suffocation.

So, um, not great!

In short, bees are kept in unpleasant, artificial conditions, where a third of the hives die off during the winter from poor insulation—often being baked alive or freezing to death. They’re overworked and left chronically malnourished, all while riddled with parasites and subject to invasive and stressful inspections. And given the profound extent to which the honey industry brings invasive disease to wild bees and crowds out other pollinators, the net environmental impact is relatively unclear. The standard notion that honey should be eaten to preserve bees is a vast oversimplification.

Thus, if you eat even moderate amounts of honey, you cause extremely large numbers of bees to experience extremely unpleasant fates for extremely long times. If bees matter even negligibly, this is very bad!

Indeed, bees seem to matter a surprising amount. They are far more cognitively sophisticated than most other insects, having about a million neurons—far more than our current president. Bees make complex tradeoffs between pain and reward, display pessimism, show recognition of their bodies, make transitive inference (which some philosophers don’t do), and dream. Rethink Priorities notes bees have been shown to display every behavioral proxy of consciousness, including:

• Displaying individual personality.

• Foregoing temporary benefit for greater long term reward.

• Not acting on one’s impulses.

• Exhibiting a pessimism bias (thinking, if they’re been exposed to new positive and negative stimuli at an equal rate, probably the next stimuli will be harmful).

• Skill at navigating.

• Making tradeoffs between pain and gain.

• Recognizing numbers (if bees were offered some reward when offered, say, 4 things, even of different types, they learned to get excited when seeing four things).

• Problem solving.

• Responding cautiously to novel experiences.

• Quickly identifying when some reward conditioning has been reversed (for instance, if a creature is initially rewarded when a bell is rung and then they’re shocked when it’s rung, they quickly learn to dread the bell).

• Learning from others.

• Mentally representing where in space other creatures are.

• Discounting rewards longer in the future.

• Using tools to manipulate a ball.

• Judging which of two things it regards as more likely to happen (bees opt out of difficult trials, in favor of easy ones, to try to get a reward).

• Being anxious.

• Learning from pain.

• Fidgeting in response to stress.

• Parental care.

• Being afraid.

• Being helpful.

• Self medicating.

• Having their response be modified by pain killers.

• Comparatively assessing the relative value of different nectars, and other potential rewards.

• Disliking particular tastes.

The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!

Edit 7/1: People have been getting too hung up on the exact numbers. You shouldn’t take them too literally. They’re just meant to be a sort of rough, order of magnitude estimate.

If we assume conservatively that a bee’s life is 10% as unpleasant as chicken life, and then downweight it by the relative intensity of their suffering, then consuming a kg of honey is over 500 times worse than consuming a kg of chicken! And these estimates were fairly conservative. I think it’s more plausible that eating honey is thousands of times worse than eating comparable amounts of chicken, which is itself over a dozen times worse than eating comparable amounts of beef. If we assume very very very conservatively that a day of honey bee life is as unpleasant as a day spent attending a boring lecture, and then multiply by .15 to take into account the fact bees are probably less sentient than people, eating a kg of honey causes about as much suffering as forcing a person to attend boring lectures continuously for 30,000 days. That’s about an entire lifetime of a human, spent entirely on drudgery. That’s like being forced to read an entire Curtis Yarvin article from start to finish. And that is wildly conservative.

I feel I’ve already repeated my shtick often enough about the badness of pain being because of how it feels, so I won’t repeat it in detail. Headaches are bad because they hurt, not (entirely at least) because the people having them are smart. Causing staggeringly, mind-blowingly large quantities of animal pain is bad because pain is bad. Unpleasant experiences are unpleasant. And while in practice we don’t take seriously bee interests, they’re complex, likely able to suffer, and surprisingly intelligent. It’s not okay to mass starve and roast such creatures just because they’re small. If you wouldn’t be fine doing such things to larger creatures with similar behavior, you shouldn’t be fine doing them to bees.

So don’t eat honey! If you eat honey, you are causing staggeringly large amounts of very intense suffering. Eating honey is many times worse than eating other animal products, which are themselves bad enough. If you want to make an easy change to your diet to prevent a lot of the suffering that you cause, please, for the love of God, avoid honey.

(You wouldn’t hurt this little guy, would you?)

Update: Glenn leaves the following comment which, if right, seems to make clear just how important not eating honey is:

I thought I had a gotcha here because people eat a lot less honey by mass compared to other animal products. But even if you adjust for consumption per capita, honey is still probably the worst. The average American eats about 1 kg of honey per year, 2 kg of shrimps, and 50 kg of chickens. You could be very doubtful about bee sentience and think bee lives are only slightly negative, and honey would still be the worst animal product by far. Which is to say: it would be better for a typical person to be omnivorous but happen to not eat honey than to be vegan except for honey.