I sent this to my brother, a canadian beekeeper. His response:
This has so many holes in it I don't know where to begin.
The business has two sources of income, the first renting bees out to pollinate crops, most if not all of these hives the honey is not collected. These bees live a terrible life. This business mainly exists in the US, not Canada.
Bee hives that are used to produce honey are a totally different business, where bees are well cared for, and stress levels are kept at a minimum as that produces the best harvest.
So if you are really a hard core vegan you should avoid all crops which need bees to pollinate, good luck with that one, in the US, crops relie on these bees as there are few wild pollinators left after pesticides have made them all but extinct.
There are also bees that are part of both businesses, as was my bee keeping. These bees stay in one location and are well cared for and likely live a much better life than wild bees. This is likely where most of our honey comes from.
(Smokers burn their wings off. Where did that come from?)
A “mere assertion” from an actual expert which field experience doesn’t mean much to a novice internet philosopher with a ideological axe to grind who wrote a hyperbolic article extrapolated mainly from another ideological project with less than rigorous standards for proof? Shocking.
Also yes, you have to be extremely deficient in competence to melt the wings of your bees with a smoker. Implying that this happens with meaningful frequency makes it obvious you have no idea what you are talking about. How do I know? I keep a few wild swarms. Do I think industrial beekeeping has a lot of issues? Sure. But your engagement on this subject is as incurious as your zealotry is fanatical.
"Implying that this happens with meaningful frequency" makes me think you didn't fully read the article, he quite literally says "though my sense is this is somewhat rare" when discussing the frequency of smokers melting the wings off of bees.
Also, I agree that bees live better lives than wild bees. If you handle your hive optimally, it might even be that your bees live great lives. This isn't true for most of the honey industry.
30% of bees die during the winter, 4-11% die within their first day of adulthood, drone bees (~15% of the bee population) virtually all die slowly following expulsion, and hives have a 12-year average annual mortality rate of 39.6% (typically due to Varroa destructor).
<3 this, except for the idea that any bees live “horrible lives.” I believe that anyone who thinks that / worries about that has never really suffered (or loved another human who has ever really suffered). (Not saying only human suffering matters, but to think a miniscule nervous system can experience anything like the worst human suffering is delusional.)
Interesting! What do you think it would take for bees to live positive (in expectation) lives, and might advocacy to that end be more tractable than advocating for abstention from honey?
(Is it really "conservative" to estimate that time spent as a bee is "10% as unpleasant" as time spent as a factory-farmed chicken? Without knowing much, I would have guessed that a fair portion of a bee's life is reasonably pleasant, whereas factory-farmed chicken life is basically unrelentingly awful?)
I think it is. Part of this is because bees are pretty chronically hungry, overworked, etc. Part of it is that the painfulness of death seems like a non-trivial portion of the badness of chicken life. If bees have similarly painful deaths, then that contains a non-trivial portion of the badness.
There's no evolutionary pressure for bees to not live painful lives. In fact, there is an evolutionary pressure in the opposite direction. My most productive days have been riddled with stress and coffee. If my entire life was stressful, I'd probably commit suicide. But bees, lacking the intelligence to make such a connection, wouldn't. I didn't understand the concept of death until 5 years old. Furthermore, there are a ton of things that can kill or threaten individual bees. Thus, the evolutionary pressure is, in fact, in favour of bees living really stressful lives!
I can't back that up with hard numbers, but from what I've been reading about bee lives, it's pretty bad. BB mentions that 30% of bees die during the winter, but also, 4-11% die within their first day of adulthood, drone bees (~15% of the bee population) virtually all die slowly following expulsion, and hives have a 12-year average annual mortality rate of 39.6% (typically due to Varroa destructor).
It seems highly unlikely that a species' life in its natural environment could be characterised by constant pain. The purpose of pain is to change a creature's behaviour; constant pain would completely undermine this. I don't know to what extent farmed bees could be considered to live in "their natural environment", which depends both on how similar farmed hives are to the wild, and on the extent of bee evolution during the era of human agriculture.
There are many things in human lives which we find stressful at first but get used to - work, certain kinds of physical pain, etc. Perhaps bees wouldn't acclimatise to pain in the way humans do, and even if they do there are probably certain kinds of pain which they wouldn't acclimatise to. I could be persuaded that bees never get used to being "overworked", but it would be surprising.
Certain kinds of death are surely painful and drawn-out, e.g. death of starvation. By contrast if a bee is eaten alive, I'm sure it's immensely painful for a few seconds, but it probably isn't all that much pain overall.
"The purpose of pain is to change a creature's behavior"
I don't know if that's necessarily true. It could be that the purpose of pain is to guide a creature's behavior. It certainly seems plausible that exposure to constant psychological stressors serves as a great motivational feature.
Build Effective Animal Advocacy in Asia: Develop advocacy capacity in China/India, which have ~22 million hives (more than Europe + Americas combined).
Reduce Pollination Demand: Lower demand via self-fertile crops, mechanical pollination, wild pollinator increases, or reduced almond consumption.
Increase Access to Natural Forage: Plant diverse flowers near hives or move hives to better forage areas to prevent malnutrition.
Manage Pesticide Risk: Improve applicator training, use dropleg nozzles, coordinate spraying schedules, and restrict neonicotinoids.
Reduce Homing Errors: Paint hives different colors and vary heights/orientations to prevent 40% drift rate and disease spread.
Minimize Harvest Disruption: Use Flow Hives to extract honey without opening hives, though regular inspections are still needed.
Have you ever seen the Bee Movie? I think this very clearly demonstrated the consequences of an end to honey farming; Bee unemployment, b crises of meaning and ecological collapse.
In all seriousness though, I think there's a lot of anthropomorphizing of animals that have a very different experience of the world than we do. A Bee that works its entire life producing honey may look to be in hell to us, but its lived experience may very well be overwhelmingly positive, assuming there aren't outside negative stressors. Human farming might add stress to a colony, but it also might remove many stresses that were found in nature.
Bees produce honey so they can survive the winter, mostly for heat. For farmers that keep colonies around for the whole year, taking of the honey doesn't negatively effect their odds of survival. I think of it like sled dogs. Yes, they burn a lot of excess calories that if they were in nature would be punishing, but because of humans, they thrive despite this unnecessary energy burning. Many of them seem to very much enjoy the strenuous activity over just chilling, and in the case of insects, seem to be motivated to protect the hive so much that they literally sacrifice themselves by the thousands for the good of the whole. It seem strange to me that a billion years of evolution would produce insects that have a profoundly negative experience on the whole.
As for human involvement in that, I don't really know enough about it to say. Maybe the increased safety makes it positive. Maybe the unique stressors we can introduce makes it negative.
Directionally interesting post, but doesn't it set off skepticism alarm bells in your head when you read "bees suffer 15% as much as humans"? When paired with a simple utilitarian view of morality that leads to some pretty wild conclusions: you should extend the life of seven honey bees by a year, instead of extending one human's lifespan by one year. For me this is far, far into reductio ad absurdum territory
You are conflating "bees suffer 15% as much as humans" with "bee lives have 15% of the value of human lives". The conclusion would need to be something like "we should prevent seven years of X-intensity bee suffering" instead of preventing one year of X-intensity human suffering".
This feels like a very hard negative utilitarian view. What if we're talking ten thousand human deaths versus a million bees? Ten thousand human deaths is a lot. Yet by this logic, do we not kill them all?
I love it when I read the title of a Bentham’s Bulldog post, think about it for a second, and say “Oh wow yup that makes sense, didn’t think about that”
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.
You throw out a ton of under-cited claims at the reader to overwhelm them with information, which helps to gloss over the fact that the information you present barely backs up your premise and is often internally inconsistent. The Rethink Priorities essay, which you cite over 20 times in this article, was written by a philosopher with no background in apiary or agricultural science.
I generally agree with your approach towards morality, but it looks like you’re wielding it in bad faith here. This entire article is premised on the idea that honeybees otherwise do not suffer if not for human intervention. In reality, you should be doing much more work to compare wild hives to managed hives in order to establish the moral consequences of honeybee agriculture.
You also make no distinction between prematurely ending an animals life by force (slaughtering livestock) and eating a byproduct of an animal’s otherwise suffering-intensive existence (eating honey). This is an important distinction, is it not? Abstracting this to the human realm, I find robbery to be less morally repugnant than murder/cannibalism.
Below are some excerpts from the article and my specific refutations of them:
>>”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).”<<
Your source, an article from waybackmachine does some very unusual math. I did my own math: a honey bee is known to produce about 1/12 tsp of honey over the course of its life. This is 0.4mL, or 0.58g of honey once you take the density of honey into account. Therefore, about 1800 bees are required to produce a kg of honey. Your source calculates the amount of days of honey bee life needed to produce this kilogram and compares this to the amount of days needed to produce a kilogram of chicken. Laughably, it then concludes that 1kg of honey is morally equivalent to 9,335kg of chicken! Do you really believe letting 1,800 honeybees live full-length & productive lives is worse than slaughtering 20,000lb worth of chicken?
>>“Often, the bees sting themselves to death”<<
No, they don’t. They would, if they weren’t passivated by smoking.
>>“Sometimes, however, smoking melts the wings of bees”<<
Yes, improper smoking will damage and kill bees. Countless non-standard accidents can damage and kill bees. Improper smoking is not the once-in-a-while accident you paint it as.
>>“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.”<<
About 50% of hives in the wild die off during the winter. The probability of a managed colony dying over the winter is less than that of a wild colony.
>>“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.”<<
Your sources don’t even support this. Your sources outline that some beekepers harvest before winter and keep bees alive via artificial sugar syrup and protein supplements. Again, you are grossly mischaracterizing something as the norm when it is in fact the exact outcome which is avoided because the hive is being farmed by humans. Your sources only extoll the potential nutritional deficits imposed by artificial food sources, which of course is important, but feeding bees formula doesn’t exactly give you the same moral slam dunk does it?
>>Bees also undergo unpleasant transport conditions. More than half of bee colonies are transported at some point.<<
The vast majority of transported colonies are in fact utilized for pollination services and these colonies are not farmed for their honey. Your source says this. It is completely irrelevant to the moral argument against eating honey.
>>“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!”<<
For someone who is philosophically-minded, you play fast and loose with quantifying subjective experiences in beings which experience fundamentally different lives. The underlying insinuation you make here is that both are net negative lives.
I would also like to make other commenters aware of a passage from the Rethink Priorities essay:
“More worryingly, it might be the case that insect lives in general are net-negative. If that’s the case, then interventions that increase the overall insect population are very likely to reduce overall welfare.”
The author is saying here that insect lives must, by nature, be suffering. Therefore, the moral intervention would be any intervention which decreases overall insect populations. I guess I've never heard someone justify their veganism with pro-mass-extinction beliefs before.
Presumably Shukraft talked to industry experts in compiling his report! I do not think that what goes on in the honey industry is the sort of thing that one can't discover through research unless they have a background in agricultural science, and in fact would prefer a philosopher because they tend to be less confused.
You criticize the number but then give a very similar number. If 1800 bees are needed to produce a kg of honey, then if they live about 100 days, the numbers are similar.
Even though smoking reduces the extent of bee stinging, it still happens with decent frequency.
I don't comment on the frequency of smoking deaths. Though I have now added a sentence to make it clear that it is relatively rare.
The data I've seen is that about 10-20% of wild bees die off. But so what? Imagine that wild koalas suffered greatly in nature, constantly getting their limbs ripped off by wild jackals. Would that mean it was okay for us to do that? Why in the world is nature the relevant comparison?
You claim my source doesn't say that they often take too much honey and feed bees other stuff. It quite cleaarly does! Here's what it says:
"According to Garrido & Nanetti 2019, “starvation is still a common cause of winter colony losses” (85). To reduce the risk of starvation, commercial beekeepers often provide their colonies with a honey substitute during the winter, such as inexpensive white cane sugar syrup. Although sugar syrup often secures overwinter survival of the colony, sugar syrup lacks many of the micronutrients that honey contains"
//The vast majority of transported colonies are in fact utilized for pollination services and these colonies are not farmed for their honey.//
Very often the pollinators are used both for honey and pollination services!
//The underlying insinuation you make here is that both are net negative lives.//
I'm not insinuating anything! I am stating it!
//The author is saying here that insect lives must, by nature, be suffering.//
I agree philosophers should be able to comment on beekeeping, but I think it is dubious to premise your philosophical argument on that article. You are treating it as an accurate overview of the current beekeeping paradigm, when it is actually just another article commenting on the moral consequences of beekeeping. Like a game of telephone.
>>You criticize the number but then give a very similar number. If 1800 bees are needed to produce a kg of honey, then if they live about 100 days, the numbers are similar.<<
If I'm being very generous, a chicken might yield 3kg of meat. Your source equates the moral consequence of 1,800 full-length bee lives to the premature slaughter of 3,000 chickens. How does this make sense? How are these numbers "similar"? What is the moral unit by which you are comparing these two scenarios?
>>"Imagine that wild koalas suffered greatly in nature, constantly getting their limbs ripped off by wild jackals. Would that mean it was okay for us to do that? Why in the world is nature the relevant comparison?"<<
This article is meant to be written about the moral consequences of eating farmed honey, correct? You are not arguing against the existence of bees altogether, but rather arguing that consuming honey is immoral. Because managed hives compete with wild hives, the argument should be premised against the experience of wild bees.
>>You claim my source doesn't say that they often take too much honey and feed bees other stuff. It quite cleaarly does! Here's what it says: "According to Garrido & Nanetti 2019, “starvation is still a common cause of winter colony losses” (85).<<
The Rethink Priorities essay you are citing here links to a passage from a textbook, which itself cites this comment to two studies published in German. I don't care enough to translate and read these German studies, but I will at least add the next sentence of the book which clarifies that winter colony losses by starvation are the exact outcome which is avoided by beekeeper intervention:
"However, starvation is still a common cause of winter colony losses (Brodschneider and Crailsheim 2010; vanEngelsdorp et al. 2010). This situation is usually avoided by beekeepers but may occur in long winters or if colonies lose the contact to the food stores."
Good article! In spite of the sympathy bees gets from environmentalists, honeybee managing seems particularly sidelined in animal advocacy. Though the next animal advocacy event I'm going to has a long-conference on bee sentience, so maybe things are moving in the right direction!
•Animals generally prefer existing despite suffering. If the decision is made to wipe out bee lineages via never utilizing them then the decision has implicitly been made that existence is outweighed by suffering despite the animal themselves observably not making that choice.
•Article does not discuss colony collapse disorder. This is, specific to bees, incredibly important because it highlights a few things. 1. the bees don't have to stay, they can mostly just fly off without the queen and you can't do anything about it. 2. Wild bee populations are cratering, which people think is related to CCD, and brings up the argument that farm bees are doing better than their peers.
•Bee suffering and existence calculus is so alien to the human one as to be a category error. How do I know? Bees die when they sting you. Just that very fact throws so many wrenches into any equivalence between human and bee brains that it would deserve its own paper. This is the same thing with how salmon turn into rotting husk zombies after getting laid. Their opinions, minds and life are actually different and you get false conclusions that are wrong on the face of it (such as arguing to castrate fish) by assuming they're similar.
a lot of non vegans use this as an argument against veganism, and since youre doing this kind of utilitarian analysis by multiplying bee pain by number of bees to determine how bad it is, how do you respond to these? Avocados, almonds, apples, cherries, blueberries, and many more. tons and tons of crop producers breed bees and mistreat them. can you not eat any of those then? and if no, should we limit our calorie intake of them? same with other bugs. you ever seen those videos of cranberries and the millions of spiders on them? they all die. It seems there are insane entailments from valuing bugs. It's better to eat pure grass fed beef than to eat fruits, and if not, you still shouldn't eat those fruits I listed, and you should limit your calorie intake to avoid causing more suffering since bugs die in crops production, and not to mention the number of bugs you hit with your car when you drive, cut the grass, take a walk in the forest, etc.. valuing insects (even just bees) just has too many insanely unintuitive entailments to be true
I think this is the wrong way of doing epistemology. If the world is weird (in that our actions harm tons of bugs) you shouldn't use that to stop valuing bugs. In a morally weird world, our ethical theory should say weird things. The entailments aren't insane--they're just different from what we'd have expected because we were ignorant of the facts.
As an analogy, suppose we discovered bacteria were conscious and agentic--just like people. In fact, imagine they were smarter than people. It would be absurd to conclude "well, they must not matter because that has insane entailments." It would just mean that the facts of the world are inconvenient. See also https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/surely-were-not-moral-monsters?utm_source=publication-search
I think there is some reason to avoid avocados, almonds, etc, but honey is the worst. Almonds are pretty bad too--so I avoid them. I try to avoid the others but am not as fastidious about it.
I think that killing insects is probably good because it lives bad lives.
Some information from ChatGPT: Summer worker bees live 4-6 weeks in the summer, while those that stay the winter live 4-6 months. Drones live a few weeks.
Some bees die from pesticides, which are neurotoxins that cause disorientation, paralysis, and death, over minutes to hours.
Some bees die from parasites which cause a slow death over days to weeks.
Some bees are eaten by birds, spiders, or other predators
Drones die because "their abdomen ruptures during copulation". (sounds painful)
When a worker bee dies from "aging" they exhibit a gradual decline over the last 1-2 days of their life. According to ChatGPT, their bodies fail due to "intense labor".
Bees that do foraging fly so much that their wings become tattered, their flight muscles are exhausted and riddled with microscopic tears, and their bodies are plagued with extreme oxidative stress.
When bees get "old" they exhibit less efficient metabolism and they may struggle to regulate their body temperature or produce the energy needed for flight. They may become disoriented and unable to return to the hive.
When a bee is close to death, they often leave the hive to die, to reduce disease risk for the colony, or other bees may push them out.
ChatGPT is skeptical that natural death for a bee is painful - " they show nociceptive responses (they can react to harmful stimuli), but no evidence suggests they suffer or experience distress in a conscious way."
If they are conscious (which I think is likely), then none of this sounds great. Evolution did not select for them to have great lives.
for the record I don't eat honey and haven't for years, I just don't really like people saying "animal product X isn't even that tasty". I went vegan despite my favorite foods being animal products, I'm always looking for good replacements, and I think this line of thinking misses a couple important things: 1, that a LOT of people really like the flavor, and saying that kind of thing might give them the impression that vegans just happen to not like animal products, so it's easy for them to switch, but if they did like it they couldn't switch, and 2, it skirts around the point that really liking something doesn't give you license to do it. No matter how much fun a sadist gets out of torture, it doesn't somehow make it ok.
I agree that some animal products are tasty. Cheese tastes amazing and I genuinely liked the taste of meat when I still used to eat it. Honey is just too sweet for me, I guess
Good article. I feel like a bit more of an analysis of the environmental impacts are needed. It feels potentially large.
Also I know this is not relevant to the main argument, but listening to a boring lecture is clearly net-positive to me. Life is easily good enough to outweigh a little boredom.
I’m curious about the counterfactual with the bees being in the wild. Could you make the argument that there are also benefits to being raised by a beekeeper, like protection from predation, parasites, etc.?
But the counterfactual *isn't* the bees being raised in the wild. It's the bees not existing. And parasites predation etc are probably more common on farms.
I saw the following comment online, arguing that bees live better lives in captivity than the wild. Thoughts?
"You know the bees can and will leave if the hive conditions are worse than they could find out in a tree somewhere, right? ...it's called absconding. There isn't really any pressure to breed it out because it's not terribly difficult for an experienced beekeeper to just provide better conditions than the bees would otherwise find on their own"
3) Is that true? The comment I quoted said it doesn't happen.
4) But leaving means abandoning the honey anyway.
5) Bees, after relocating, are capable of scouting out every flower in their vicinity to make new honey, but not capable of scouting out relocation sites?
So the non-identity thing is there, but if we table that for a second, are you saying that predation and parasites are more common in farmed bees rather than bees in the wild?
I sent this to my brother, a canadian beekeeper. His response:
This has so many holes in it I don't know where to begin.
The business has two sources of income, the first renting bees out to pollinate crops, most if not all of these hives the honey is not collected. These bees live a terrible life. This business mainly exists in the US, not Canada.
Bee hives that are used to produce honey are a totally different business, where bees are well cared for, and stress levels are kept at a minimum as that produces the best harvest.
So if you are really a hard core vegan you should avoid all crops which need bees to pollinate, good luck with that one, in the US, crops relie on these bees as there are few wild pollinators left after pesticides have made them all but extinct.
There are also bees that are part of both businesses, as was my bee keeping. These bees stay in one location and are well cared for and likely live a much better life than wild bees. This is likely where most of our honey comes from.
(Smokers burn their wings off. Where did that come from?)
I think honey bees used to pollinate crops are bad too! For this reason, I don't eat almonds and try to avoid other plausibly bee-pollinated foods.
A mere assertion that the bees are treated nicely doesn't mean that much.
The smoker point came from the article I linked.
A “mere assertion” from an actual expert which field experience doesn’t mean much to a novice internet philosopher with a ideological axe to grind who wrote a hyperbolic article extrapolated mainly from another ideological project with less than rigorous standards for proof? Shocking.
Also yes, you have to be extremely deficient in competence to melt the wings of your bees with a smoker. Implying that this happens with meaningful frequency makes it obvious you have no idea what you are talking about. How do I know? I keep a few wild swarms. Do I think industrial beekeeping has a lot of issues? Sure. But your engagement on this subject is as incurious as your zealotry is fanatical.
"Implying that this happens with meaningful frequency" makes me think you didn't fully read the article, he quite literally says "though my sense is this is somewhat rare" when discussing the frequency of smokers melting the wings off of bees.
I'm sure there was a more benevolent way of framing this comment.
That being said, I agree with your point.
smokers can burn wings off, but only if handled by an amateur beekeeper. https://www.buddhabeeapiary.com/blog/why-do-beekeepers-use-smoke
Also, I agree that bees live better lives than wild bees. If you handle your hive optimally, it might even be that your bees live great lives. This isn't true for most of the honey industry.
30% of bees die during the winter, 4-11% die within their first day of adulthood, drone bees (~15% of the bee population) virtually all die slowly following expulsion, and hives have a 12-year average annual mortality rate of 39.6% (typically due to Varroa destructor).
<3 this, except for the idea that any bees live “horrible lives.” I believe that anyone who thinks that / worries about that has never really suffered (or loved another human who has ever really suffered). (Not saying only human suffering matters, but to think a miniscule nervous system can experience anything like the worst human suffering is delusional.)
Interesting! What do you think it would take for bees to live positive (in expectation) lives, and might advocacy to that end be more tractable than advocating for abstention from honey?
(Is it really "conservative" to estimate that time spent as a bee is "10% as unpleasant" as time spent as a factory-farmed chicken? Without knowing much, I would have guessed that a fair portion of a bee's life is reasonably pleasant, whereas factory-farmed chicken life is basically unrelentingly awful?)
I think it is. Part of this is because bees are pretty chronically hungry, overworked, etc. Part of it is that the painfulness of death seems like a non-trivial portion of the badness of chicken life. If bees have similarly painful deaths, then that contains a non-trivial portion of the badness.
There's no evolutionary pressure for bees to not live painful lives. In fact, there is an evolutionary pressure in the opposite direction. My most productive days have been riddled with stress and coffee. If my entire life was stressful, I'd probably commit suicide. But bees, lacking the intelligence to make such a connection, wouldn't. I didn't understand the concept of death until 5 years old. Furthermore, there are a ton of things that can kill or threaten individual bees. Thus, the evolutionary pressure is, in fact, in favour of bees living really stressful lives!
I can't back that up with hard numbers, but from what I've been reading about bee lives, it's pretty bad. BB mentions that 30% of bees die during the winter, but also, 4-11% die within their first day of adulthood, drone bees (~15% of the bee population) virtually all die slowly following expulsion, and hives have a 12-year average annual mortality rate of 39.6% (typically due to Varroa destructor).
It seems highly unlikely that a species' life in its natural environment could be characterised by constant pain. The purpose of pain is to change a creature's behaviour; constant pain would completely undermine this. I don't know to what extent farmed bees could be considered to live in "their natural environment", which depends both on how similar farmed hives are to the wild, and on the extent of bee evolution during the era of human agriculture.
There are many things in human lives which we find stressful at first but get used to - work, certain kinds of physical pain, etc. Perhaps bees wouldn't acclimatise to pain in the way humans do, and even if they do there are probably certain kinds of pain which they wouldn't acclimatise to. I could be persuaded that bees never get used to being "overworked", but it would be surprising.
Certain kinds of death are surely painful and drawn-out, e.g. death of starvation. By contrast if a bee is eaten alive, I'm sure it's immensely painful for a few seconds, but it probably isn't all that much pain overall.
"The purpose of pain is to change a creature's behavior"
I don't know if that's necessarily true. It could be that the purpose of pain is to guide a creature's behavior. It certainly seems plausible that exposure to constant psychological stressors serves as a great motivational feature.
https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/managed-honey-bee-welfare-problems-and-potential-interventions/#h.557sm9t1kway
The RP report has a number of suggested interventions in 6 broad classes. I briefly summarized them in my first substack post (https://linch.substack.com/p/eating-honey-is-probably-fine-actually?utm_source=activity_item)
Build Effective Animal Advocacy in Asia: Develop advocacy capacity in China/India, which have ~22 million hives (more than Europe + Americas combined).
Reduce Pollination Demand: Lower demand via self-fertile crops, mechanical pollination, wild pollinator increases, or reduced almond consumption.
Increase Access to Natural Forage: Plant diverse flowers near hives or move hives to better forage areas to prevent malnutrition.
Manage Pesticide Risk: Improve applicator training, use dropleg nozzles, coordinate spraying schedules, and restrict neonicotinoids.
Reduce Homing Errors: Paint hives different colors and vary heights/orientations to prevent 40% drift rate and disease spread.
Minimize Harvest Disruption: Use Flow Hives to extract honey without opening hives, though regular inspections are still needed.
Have you ever seen the Bee Movie? I think this very clearly demonstrated the consequences of an end to honey farming; Bee unemployment, b crises of meaning and ecological collapse.
In all seriousness though, I think there's a lot of anthropomorphizing of animals that have a very different experience of the world than we do. A Bee that works its entire life producing honey may look to be in hell to us, but its lived experience may very well be overwhelmingly positive, assuming there aren't outside negative stressors. Human farming might add stress to a colony, but it also might remove many stresses that were found in nature.
Bees produce honey so they can survive the winter, mostly for heat. For farmers that keep colonies around for the whole year, taking of the honey doesn't negatively effect their odds of survival. I think of it like sled dogs. Yes, they burn a lot of excess calories that if they were in nature would be punishing, but because of humans, they thrive despite this unnecessary energy burning. Many of them seem to very much enjoy the strenuous activity over just chilling, and in the case of insects, seem to be motivated to protect the hive so much that they literally sacrifice themselves by the thousands for the good of the whole. It seem strange to me that a billion years of evolution would produce insects that have a profoundly negative experience on the whole.
As for human involvement in that, I don't really know enough about it to say. Maybe the increased safety makes it positive. Maybe the unique stressors we can introduce makes it negative.
Bentham has the worst case of anthropomorphizing I have seen. And also I think he is wrong about how he views ecology and animal pain.
Directionally interesting post, but doesn't it set off skepticism alarm bells in your head when you read "bees suffer 15% as much as humans"? When paired with a simple utilitarian view of morality that leads to some pretty wild conclusions: you should extend the life of seven honey bees by a year, instead of extending one human's lifespan by one year. For me this is far, far into reductio ad absurdum territory
You are conflating "bees suffer 15% as much as humans" with "bee lives have 15% of the value of human lives". The conclusion would need to be something like "we should prevent seven years of X-intensity bee suffering" instead of preventing one year of X-intensity human suffering".
This feels like a very hard negative utilitarian view. What if we're talking ten thousand human deaths versus a million bees? Ten thousand human deaths is a lot. Yet by this logic, do we not kill them all?
I love it when I read the title of a Bentham’s Bulldog post, think about it for a second, and say “Oh wow yup that makes sense, didn’t think about that”
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.
You throw out a ton of under-cited claims at the reader to overwhelm them with information, which helps to gloss over the fact that the information you present barely backs up your premise and is often internally inconsistent. The Rethink Priorities essay, which you cite over 20 times in this article, was written by a philosopher with no background in apiary or agricultural science.
I generally agree with your approach towards morality, but it looks like you’re wielding it in bad faith here. This entire article is premised on the idea that honeybees otherwise do not suffer if not for human intervention. In reality, you should be doing much more work to compare wild hives to managed hives in order to establish the moral consequences of honeybee agriculture.
You also make no distinction between prematurely ending an animals life by force (slaughtering livestock) and eating a byproduct of an animal’s otherwise suffering-intensive existence (eating honey). This is an important distinction, is it not? Abstracting this to the human realm, I find robbery to be less morally repugnant than murder/cannibalism.
Below are some excerpts from the article and my specific refutations of them:
>>”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).”<<
Your source, an article from waybackmachine does some very unusual math. I did my own math: a honey bee is known to produce about 1/12 tsp of honey over the course of its life. This is 0.4mL, or 0.58g of honey once you take the density of honey into account. Therefore, about 1800 bees are required to produce a kg of honey. Your source calculates the amount of days of honey bee life needed to produce this kilogram and compares this to the amount of days needed to produce a kilogram of chicken. Laughably, it then concludes that 1kg of honey is morally equivalent to 9,335kg of chicken! Do you really believe letting 1,800 honeybees live full-length & productive lives is worse than slaughtering 20,000lb worth of chicken?
>>“Often, the bees sting themselves to death”<<
No, they don’t. They would, if they weren’t passivated by smoking.
>>“Sometimes, however, smoking melts the wings of bees”<<
Yes, improper smoking will damage and kill bees. Countless non-standard accidents can damage and kill bees. Improper smoking is not the once-in-a-while accident you paint it as.
>>“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.”<<
About 50% of hives in the wild die off during the winter. The probability of a managed colony dying over the winter is less than that of a wild colony.
>>“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.”<<
Your sources don’t even support this. Your sources outline that some beekepers harvest before winter and keep bees alive via artificial sugar syrup and protein supplements. Again, you are grossly mischaracterizing something as the norm when it is in fact the exact outcome which is avoided because the hive is being farmed by humans. Your sources only extoll the potential nutritional deficits imposed by artificial food sources, which of course is important, but feeding bees formula doesn’t exactly give you the same moral slam dunk does it?
>>Bees also undergo unpleasant transport conditions. More than half of bee colonies are transported at some point.<<
The vast majority of transported colonies are in fact utilized for pollination services and these colonies are not farmed for their honey. Your source says this. It is completely irrelevant to the moral argument against eating honey.
>>“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!”<<
For someone who is philosophically-minded, you play fast and loose with quantifying subjective experiences in beings which experience fundamentally different lives. The underlying insinuation you make here is that both are net negative lives.
I would also like to make other commenters aware of a passage from the Rethink Priorities essay:
“More worryingly, it might be the case that insect lives in general are net-negative. If that’s the case, then interventions that increase the overall insect population are very likely to reduce overall welfare.”
The author is saying here that insect lives must, by nature, be suffering. Therefore, the moral intervention would be any intervention which decreases overall insect populations. I guess I've never heard someone justify their veganism with pro-mass-extinction beliefs before.
Presumably Shukraft talked to industry experts in compiling his report! I do not think that what goes on in the honey industry is the sort of thing that one can't discover through research unless they have a background in agricultural science, and in fact would prefer a philosopher because they tend to be less confused.
You criticize the number but then give a very similar number. If 1800 bees are needed to produce a kg of honey, then if they live about 100 days, the numbers are similar.
Even though smoking reduces the extent of bee stinging, it still happens with decent frequency.
I don't comment on the frequency of smoking deaths. Though I have now added a sentence to make it clear that it is relatively rare.
The data I've seen is that about 10-20% of wild bees die off. But so what? Imagine that wild koalas suffered greatly in nature, constantly getting their limbs ripped off by wild jackals. Would that mean it was okay for us to do that? Why in the world is nature the relevant comparison?
You claim my source doesn't say that they often take too much honey and feed bees other stuff. It quite cleaarly does! Here's what it says:
"According to Garrido & Nanetti 2019, “starvation is still a common cause of winter colony losses” (85). To reduce the risk of starvation, commercial beekeepers often provide their colonies with a honey substitute during the winter, such as inexpensive white cane sugar syrup. Although sugar syrup often secures overwinter survival of the colony, sugar syrup lacks many of the micronutrients that honey contains"
//The vast majority of transported colonies are in fact utilized for pollination services and these colonies are not farmed for their honey.//
Very often the pollinators are used both for honey and pollination services!
//The underlying insinuation you make here is that both are net negative lives.//
I'm not insinuating anything! I am stating it!
//The author is saying here that insect lives must, by nature, be suffering.//
The author is saying that it *might be* that insects contain more suffering than well-being. This is a conclusion I agree with. In fact, I think this is probably the case, for reasons I've laid out elsewhere e.g. https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-biodiversity?utm_source=publication-search
I agree philosophers should be able to comment on beekeeping, but I think it is dubious to premise your philosophical argument on that article. You are treating it as an accurate overview of the current beekeeping paradigm, when it is actually just another article commenting on the moral consequences of beekeeping. Like a game of telephone.
>>You criticize the number but then give a very similar number. If 1800 bees are needed to produce a kg of honey, then if they live about 100 days, the numbers are similar.<<
If I'm being very generous, a chicken might yield 3kg of meat. Your source equates the moral consequence of 1,800 full-length bee lives to the premature slaughter of 3,000 chickens. How does this make sense? How are these numbers "similar"? What is the moral unit by which you are comparing these two scenarios?
>>"Imagine that wild koalas suffered greatly in nature, constantly getting their limbs ripped off by wild jackals. Would that mean it was okay for us to do that? Why in the world is nature the relevant comparison?"<<
This article is meant to be written about the moral consequences of eating farmed honey, correct? You are not arguing against the existence of bees altogether, but rather arguing that consuming honey is immoral. Because managed hives compete with wild hives, the argument should be premised against the experience of wild bees.
>>You claim my source doesn't say that they often take too much honey and feed bees other stuff. It quite cleaarly does! Here's what it says: "According to Garrido & Nanetti 2019, “starvation is still a common cause of winter colony losses” (85).<<
The Rethink Priorities essay you are citing here links to a passage from a textbook, which itself cites this comment to two studies published in German. I don't care enough to translate and read these German studies, but I will at least add the next sentence of the book which clarifies that winter colony losses by starvation are the exact outcome which is avoided by beekeeper intervention:
"However, starvation is still a common cause of winter colony losses (Brodschneider and Crailsheim 2010; vanEngelsdorp et al. 2010). This situation is usually avoided by beekeepers but may occur in long winters or if colonies lose the contact to the food stores."
Good article! In spite of the sympathy bees gets from environmentalists, honeybee managing seems particularly sidelined in animal advocacy. Though the next animal advocacy event I'm going to has a long-conference on bee sentience, so maybe things are moving in the right direction!
Three primary objections to the article:
•Animals generally prefer existing despite suffering. If the decision is made to wipe out bee lineages via never utilizing them then the decision has implicitly been made that existence is outweighed by suffering despite the animal themselves observably not making that choice.
•Article does not discuss colony collapse disorder. This is, specific to bees, incredibly important because it highlights a few things. 1. the bees don't have to stay, they can mostly just fly off without the queen and you can't do anything about it. 2. Wild bee populations are cratering, which people think is related to CCD, and brings up the argument that farm bees are doing better than their peers.
•Bee suffering and existence calculus is so alien to the human one as to be a category error. How do I know? Bees die when they sting you. Just that very fact throws so many wrenches into any equivalence between human and bee brains that it would deserve its own paper. This is the same thing with how salmon turn into rotting husk zombies after getting laid. Their opinions, minds and life are actually different and you get false conclusions that are wrong on the face of it (such as arguing to castrate fish) by assuming they're similar.
a lot of non vegans use this as an argument against veganism, and since youre doing this kind of utilitarian analysis by multiplying bee pain by number of bees to determine how bad it is, how do you respond to these? Avocados, almonds, apples, cherries, blueberries, and many more. tons and tons of crop producers breed bees and mistreat them. can you not eat any of those then? and if no, should we limit our calorie intake of them? same with other bugs. you ever seen those videos of cranberries and the millions of spiders on them? they all die. It seems there are insane entailments from valuing bugs. It's better to eat pure grass fed beef than to eat fruits, and if not, you still shouldn't eat those fruits I listed, and you should limit your calorie intake to avoid causing more suffering since bugs die in crops production, and not to mention the number of bugs you hit with your car when you drive, cut the grass, take a walk in the forest, etc.. valuing insects (even just bees) just has too many insanely unintuitive entailments to be true
I think this is the wrong way of doing epistemology. If the world is weird (in that our actions harm tons of bugs) you shouldn't use that to stop valuing bugs. In a morally weird world, our ethical theory should say weird things. The entailments aren't insane--they're just different from what we'd have expected because we were ignorant of the facts.
As an analogy, suppose we discovered bacteria were conscious and agentic--just like people. In fact, imagine they were smarter than people. It would be absurd to conclude "well, they must not matter because that has insane entailments." It would just mean that the facts of the world are inconvenient. See also https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/surely-were-not-moral-monsters?utm_source=publication-search
I think there is some reason to avoid avocados, almonds, etc, but honey is the worst. Almonds are pretty bad too--so I avoid them. I try to avoid the others but am not as fastidious about it.
I think that killing insects is probably good because it lives bad lives.
Some information from ChatGPT: Summer worker bees live 4-6 weeks in the summer, while those that stay the winter live 4-6 months. Drones live a few weeks.
Some bees die from pesticides, which are neurotoxins that cause disorientation, paralysis, and death, over minutes to hours.
Some bees die from parasites which cause a slow death over days to weeks.
Some bees are eaten by birds, spiders, or other predators
Drones die because "their abdomen ruptures during copulation". (sounds painful)
When a worker bee dies from "aging" they exhibit a gradual decline over the last 1-2 days of their life. According to ChatGPT, their bodies fail due to "intense labor".
Bees that do foraging fly so much that their wings become tattered, their flight muscles are exhausted and riddled with microscopic tears, and their bodies are plagued with extreme oxidative stress.
When bees get "old" they exhibit less efficient metabolism and they may struggle to regulate their body temperature or produce the energy needed for flight. They may become disoriented and unable to return to the hive.
When a bee is close to death, they often leave the hive to die, to reduce disease risk for the colony, or other bees may push them out.
ChatGPT is skeptical that natural death for a bee is painful - " they show nociceptive responses (they can react to harmful stimuli), but no evidence suggests they suffer or experience distress in a conscious way."
If they are conscious (which I think is likely), then none of this sounds great. Evolution did not select for them to have great lives.
thankfully is disgusting anyway!
I wish I agreed.
for the record I don't eat honey and haven't for years, I just don't really like people saying "animal product X isn't even that tasty". I went vegan despite my favorite foods being animal products, I'm always looking for good replacements, and I think this line of thinking misses a couple important things: 1, that a LOT of people really like the flavor, and saying that kind of thing might give them the impression that vegans just happen to not like animal products, so it's easy for them to switch, but if they did like it they couldn't switch, and 2, it skirts around the point that really liking something doesn't give you license to do it. No matter how much fun a sadist gets out of torture, it doesn't somehow make it ok.
I agree that some animal products are tasty. Cheese tastes amazing and I genuinely liked the taste of meat when I still used to eat it. Honey is just too sweet for me, I guess
I think this piece is written with far too much confidence in sources, inferences, and conclusions.
Lol. I only read this because a friend of mine shared it. Never read anything most stupid in my entire life.
Good article. I feel like a bit more of an analysis of the environmental impacts are needed. It feels potentially large.
Also I know this is not relevant to the main argument, but listening to a boring lecture is clearly net-positive to me. Life is easily good enough to outweigh a little boredom.
I’m curious about the counterfactual with the bees being in the wild. Could you make the argument that there are also benefits to being raised by a beekeeper, like protection from predation, parasites, etc.?
But the counterfactual *isn't* the bees being raised in the wild. It's the bees not existing. And parasites predation etc are probably more common on farms.
I saw the following comment online, arguing that bees live better lives in captivity than the wild. Thoughts?
"You know the bees can and will leave if the hive conditions are worse than they could find out in a tree somewhere, right? ...it's called absconding. There isn't really any pressure to breed it out because it's not terribly difficult for an experienced beekeeper to just provide better conditions than the bees would otherwise find on their own"
They can but:
1) Often the wings of the queens are clipped so she can't leave. This makes the others not leave.
2) Bees are often very reluctant to relocate hives and only do it if the conditions are bad.
3) Bees have been artificially bred to be more docile and less likely to leave.
4) If the beekeeper takes the honey, then the bees are generally dependent on the hive.
5) Beekeepers often relocate hives, making honey bees disoriented and less likely to abscond.
This seems very weak.
2) but they do leave if conditions are bad!
3) Is that true? The comment I quoted said it doesn't happen.
4) But leaving means abandoning the honey anyway.
5) Bees, after relocating, are capable of scouting out every flower in their vicinity to make new honey, but not capable of scouting out relocation sites?
So the non-identity thing is there, but if we table that for a second, are you saying that predation and parasites are more common in farmed bees rather than bees in the wild?
I don't have data on this, but I'd be pretty confident that that is true for parasites. Probably less for predation.