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Honey: From Factory-Farmed Bees

Although there were 3,500 native species of bees pollinating the flowers and food crops of North America when European settlers landed on its shores in the 17th century, the colonists were interested only in their Old World honeybee’s wax and honey. So they imported the insects, and by the mid-1800s, both feral and domesticated colonies of honeybees were scattered all over the United States.(1) As a result of disease, pesticides, and climate changes, the honeybee population is now in decline, but since the demand for honey remains high, these tiny beings are factory- farmed, much like chickens, pigs, and cows.

The Complex Lives of Bees
A honeybee hive consists of tens of thousands of bees, each with his or her own mission that is determined by the bee’s sex and age and by the time of year. Each hive usually has one queen, hundreds of drones, and thousands of workers. Queens can live for as long as seven years, while other bees have lifespans ranging from a few weeks to six months.(2) 
 

Worker bees are responsible for feeding the brood, caring for the queen, building comb, foraging for nectar and pollen, and cleaning, ventilating, and guarding the hive. The drones serve the queen, who is responsible for reproduction. She lays about 250,000 eggs each year—as many as a million during her lifetime.(3)
 

When a new queen is about to be born, the old queen and half the hive leave their old home and set up in a new place that scouting worker bees have found.(4)
 

As the temperature drops in the winter, the bees cluster around the queen and the young, using their body heat to keep the temperature inside the hive steady at around 93°F.(5)

A Language All Their Own
Bees have a unique and complex form of communication based on sight, motion, and scent that scientists and scholars still don’t fully understand.(6) Bees alert other members of their hive to food, new hive locations, and conditions within their hive (such as nectar supply) through intricate “dance” movements.(7)
 

Studies have shown that bees are not only capable of abstract thought, they are also capable of distinguishing their own family members from other bees in the hive, using visual cues to map their travels, and finding a previously used food supply, even when their home has been moved.(8, 9, 10) And in the same way that smells can invoke powerful memories in humans, bees use their sense of smell to trigger memories of where the best food can be found.(11)

Why Bees Need Their Honey
Plants produce nectar to attract pollinators (bees, butterflies, bats, and other mammals), who are necessary for successful plant reproduction. Bees collect and use nectar to make honey, which provides vital nourishment for them, especially during the winter. Since nectar contains a lot of water, bees have to work to dry it out, and they add enzymes from their own bodies to convert it into food and prevent it from going bad.(12) To produce a pound of honey, bees must get pollen from two million flowers and fly more than 55,000 miles.(13)

Honeybees Do Not Pollinate as Well as Native Bees
Approximately one out of every three mouthfuls of food or drink that humans consume is made possible by pollinators—insects, birds, and mammals pollinate about 75 percent of all food crops.(14) Industrial beekeepers want consumers to believe that honey is just a byproduct of the necessary pollination provided by honeybees, but honeybees are not as good at pollinating as many truly wild bees, such as bumblebees and carpenter and digger bees. Native bees are active earlier in the spring, both male and females pollinate, and they are unaffected by mites and Africanized bees, which can harm honeybees.(15) But because most species of native bees hibernate for as many as 11 months out of the year and do not live in large colonies, they do not produce massive amounts of honey, and what little they do produce is not worth the effort required to steal it from them.(16, 17) So although native bees are more effective pollinators, farmers continue to rely on factory-farmed honeybees for pollination so that the honey industry can take in more than 170 million pounds of honey every year, at a value of more than $200 million.(18)

Manipulating Nature
Profiting from honey requires the manipulation and exploitation of the insects’ desire to live and protect their hive. Like other factory-farmed animals, honeybees are victims of unnatural living conditions, genetic manipulation, and stressful transportation.
 

The familiar white box that serves as a beehive has been around since the mid-1850s and was created so that beekeepers could move the hives from place to place. The New York Times reported that bees have been “moved from shapes that accommodated their own geometry to flat-topped tenements, sentenced to life in file cabinets.”(19)
 

Since “swarming” (the division of the hive upon the birth of a new queen) can cause a decline in honey production, beekeepers do what they can to prevent it, including clipping the wings of a new queen, killing and replacing an older queen after just one or two years, or confining a queen who is trying to begin a swarm.(20, 21) There are also commercial “queen rearers” who raise and mail about a million queen bees a year all over North America. Many of the animals die in transit.(22) Queens are artificially inseminated using drones, who are killed in the process.(23) Commercial beekeepers also “trick” queens into laying more eggs by adding wax cells to the hive that are larger than those that worker bees would normally build.(24)
 

Some farmers kill all the bees in the fall because it’s easier than winterizing the hives. One beekeeper admits that one of his friends “uses canisters of cyanide gas to exterminate 6,000 colonies of bees at the conclusion of the production season. It is the most economical way to run his operation.”(25) Each hive that is left to hibernate through the winter needs at least 50 pounds of honey to survive, and according to one entomologist, many bees succumb to improper care, starvation, weakness, and other problems during the winter.(26)
 

Honeybee populations have declined by as much as 50 percent since the 1980s, partly because of parasitic mites.(27) BeeCulture magazine reports that beekeepers are notorious for contributing to the spread of disease: “Beekeepers move infected combs from diseased colonies to healthy colonies, fail to recognize or treat disease, purchase old infected equipment, keep colonies too close together, [and] leave dead colonies in apiaries.”(28) Artificial diets, provided because farmers take the honey that bees would normally eat, leave bees susceptible to sickness and attack from other insects.(29) When diseases are detected, beekeepers are advised to “destroy the colony and burn the equipment,” which can mean burning or gassing the bees to death.(30)
 

Since healthy honeybees are becoming harder and harder to find, farmers have resorted to trucking hives across the country. When asked to examine 2,000 beehives rented by a New Jersey cranberry farmer, retired apiary inspectors found “about 500 colonies with equipment in such bad shape that [it] would not even qualify as junk … mice nests, old feeders full of comb, rotten hive with bees coming out from all over.” The hives were also made of wood that was labeled as having been treated with arsenic and was, therefore, unsuitable for beehives.(31)
 

Bears are also victims of the honey industry. The government of Maryland compensates beekeepers for electric fences around hives, and Virginia beekeepers have asked their legislature to allow them to kill bears.(32)

What You Can Do
Avoid honey, beeswax, propolis, royal jelly, and other products that come from bees. Vegan lip balms and candles are readily available. Visit CaringConsumer.com for a list of companies that don’t use animal products. Rice syrup, molasses, sorghum, barley malt, maple syrup, and dried fruit or fruit concentrates can be used to replace honey in recipes. Call 1-888-VEG-FOOD or visit GoVeg.com to order a free vegetarian starter kit that contains information about compassionate eating choices.

Resources

(1)Sue Hubbell, “Trouble With Honeybees,” Natural History, 106 (1997): 32-42.
(2)“The Colony and Its Organization,” Fundamentals of Beekeeping, Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extention Consortium, last accessed 17 May 2004.
(3)Ibid.
(4)Norbert M. Kauffeld, “Seasonal Cycles of Activities in Honey Bee Colonies,” Beekeeping in the United States, Agriculture Handbook 335, U.S. Department of Agriculture, revised Oct. 1980.
(5)Ibid.
(6)Fred C. Dyer, “When It Pays to Waggle,” Nature, 31 Oct. 2002.
(7)Carl Anderson and Francis L.W. Ratnieks, “Worker Allocation in Insect Societies: Coordination of Nectar Foragers and Nectar Receivers in Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) Colonies,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology (1999): 73-81.
(8)Martin Glurfa, “The Concepts of ‘Sameness’ and ‘Difference’ in an Insect,” Nature, 19 Apr. 2001.
(9)Fred C. Dyer, “Spatial Memory and Navigation by Honeybees on the Scale of the Foraging Range,” The Journal of Experimental Biology 199 (1996): 147-154.
(10)Gerard Arnold et al., “Kin Recognition in Honeybees,” Nature, 8 Feb. 1996.
(11)Judith Reinhard et al., “Scent-Triggered Navigation in Honeybees,” Nature, 29 Jan. 2004.
(12)Maryann Frazier, “Honey—Here’s to Your Health,” Beeaware, Notes and News on Bees & Beekeeping, Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium, Jan. 2003.
(13)“Number of Flowers for 1 Pound Honey,” Canadian Honey Council, 15 May 2003.
(14)“The Value of Pollinators,” Pollinator Declines Node, National Biological Information Infrastructure, U.S. Geological Service, last accessed 17 May 2004.
(15)Lane Greer, “Alternative Pollinators: Native Bees,” Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Aug. 1999.
(16)Ibid.
(17)Ibid.
(18)U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Honey: Number of Colonies, Yield, Production, Stocks, Price and Value, United States, 1993-2002,” Agricultural Statistics 2003.
(19)Anne Raver, “Bees Buzz a Path to His Hive,” The New York Times, 31 May 2001.
(20)Ibid.
(21)Elbert R. Jaycox, “Miscellaneous Techniques in Beekeeping,” Beekeeping in the Midwest, College of Agriculture, University of Illinois, reprinted Apr. 1985.
(22)Everett Oertel, “History of Beekeeping in the United States,” Beekeeping in the United States, Agriculture Handbook 335, U.S. Department of Agriculture, revised Oct. 1980.
(23)Dr. Peter Schley, “Short Instruction,” last accessed 17 May 2004.
(24)Raver.
(25)Mary Hardison, “Toward an Appropriate Beehive,” Seed and Harvest, Aug. 1992.
(26)Clarence H. Collison, “Fall Management,” Mississippi State University, 17 Feb. 1999.
(27)Michelle Boorstein, “Beekeepers Struggle to Save Buzz,” The Washington Post, 25 Apr. 2004.
(28)Nicolas Calderone, “Managing Brood Diseases,” BeeCulture, May 2001.
(29)Dee A. Lusby, “Suggested Biological Manipulative Field Management for Control of Honeybee Mites. Part #1 Concept & Causes,” BeeSource.com, 2000.
(30)Calderone.
(31)Dewey M. Caron, “Pollination Rental Colony Assessments,” Beeaware, Notes and News on Bees & Beekeeping, Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium, Jan. 2003.
(32)Boorstein.