Cruelty in Honey

Many people consume honey nowadays without giving it a second thought. Many of us do not even know why these tiny creatures produce honey and if they need this honey as well.

Smoking Hives: In some parts where there are forests available, people who are called honey collectors go deep into these forests during particular seasons, they scare the honey bees away by using smoke which they put under the honeycombs and when the majority of bees are out, they cut the part of the hive where honey is stored and practically steal these poor bees’ only source of sugar which is honey. This also causes deaths in bees at an early age as there is not enough food left for them to survive during cold harsh winters.

Feeding sugar: In the commercial production of honey, beekeepers use wooden box hives. When bees make honey during warmer seasons, they steal the honey and replace it with sugar water which does not provide the necessary nutrients for bees to sustain themselves thus causing death in bees at an early age which also results in the collapse of the whole colony.

Killing queens: When another queen bee is born, she normally leaves the hive with a certain number of bees to make her own hive as queen bees do not live in the same hive. If other queen bee leaves with workers, it means there would be fewer workers and so does the production of honey also declines. To stop that from happening, beekeepers kill one of the two bees to stop it from happening.

Cutting the wings of queens: Many beekeepers cut the wings of the queen bee and put her in a small box inside a wooden hive to stop her from leaving the hive because if the queen bee leaves the hive so do the worker bees and the rest of the colony which means no more honey to sell aka no more profit for a beekeeper.

Artificial insemination: These beekeepers also use another cruel method called artificial insemination to produce certain kinds of bees. 

Tricking bees to overwork: They also increase the size of the hives tricking bees to produce more honey which also kills bees as they work tirelessly to produce more honey and thus die of exhaustion.
In many cases, these wooden hives are transported to longer distances for pollination purposes which leads to stress in bees and results in the death of these poor bees.

A commercial honey production system exists because people consume honey and as consumers we humans are responsible for the death of millions of bees every year. And their population is also declining at alarming rates. Thus, consuming honey is not ethical whether it is harvested by locals from jungles or by beekeepers.

Because of all these methods, bee populations are declining at alarming rates. Also, it is very unethical to steal food from such poor creatures who have done nothing wrong to us. We are stealing something that we do not even need. We are simply doing it because we have done it for more than a thousand years. But it is not the moral justification to do such a cruel thing to the honey bees.