There is some good information here, but I just want to point out the fact that wild hives and even urban hives which aren’t managed do absolutely fine without humans taking and selling their honey. To suppose that the proper management of hives (the thing which bees have been managing all by themselves for hundreds of thousands of years) requires human intervention is frankly very silly. What we call “excess honey” is actually winter food storage. Yes it can ferment, yes it can attract predators, but that’s part of a natural process. Bees don’t need to be “saved” from themselves, and the idea that they do is part of a long-held, convenient narrative in which animals need be rescued from their state of nature by those who profit from their exploitation.
Bees need a helping hand now because of what we as a species have done to them and their habitat, but profiting from their honey is fairly obviously not the best way to save bees, as much as honey producers who stand to profit from the “save the bees by buying honey” narrative. While may beekeepers are hobbyists who go to great pains to look after the welfare of their hives, to discuss this issue as if that is the standard everywhere is very naive. Commercial honey production is a business, and like any business involving animal agriculture, profit usually comes before welfare. It is unwise to take any of this at face value when this information is coming from people who have a significant vested interest in the public’s perception of the honey industry.
Bees are often cruelly treated and exploited for profit by the honey industry. Queen bees are often artificially inseminated and many beekeepers cut off their wings to prevent them leaving the hive. It is standard practice for commercial operations to take all or most of the honey bees produce, and replace it with a sugar syrup substitute. When harvesting, beekeepers often use smoke to purposely disorient and panic bees, and some will even burn entire hives during winter to reduce costs. Even putting aside the harm caused to bees, making a profit out of the life’s work of other beings is exploitation, and harvesting honey is quite simply taking something which isn’t ours to use. Frankly, the fact that taking the food source of bees who work their entire lives to produce it is not essential to “saving them” should be intuitively obvious.
Apis mellifera, the species of bee we use for most honey production, are not even close to being endangered; but thousands of lesser known species are. The honey industry only boosts numbers of these captive bees, when in fact, wild bees are better pollinators and their populations are being threatened by the presence of domestic honey bees. Many diseases that have only ever existed in domestic bees are also spreading to wild bee populations and placing them in very real danger, this is thought to be a direct result of the commercial production of honey. If you are interested in helping bee populations, you can provide shelter for bees without taking their honey or making a profit from them. This, as well as planting and maintaining bee friendly flowers in your garden, is one of the most effective ways to genuinely help bees, rather than just helping their owners.
While chickens do produce eggs on their own with no encouragement from us, the volume they produce is highly unnatural. This is because chickens have been intensively bred to overproduce eggs for human consumption. The Wild Jungle Fowl, the closest wild relative to our domestic hens, lay somewhere between 10-15 eggs per year in only two clutches, whereas our modern farmed chickens can lay more than 300 eggs per year. This is extremely energy intensive for the chickens concerned, and is the loss of these calories and vitamins can cause a wide range of health problems. It is better for the chickens if they are allowed to eat their eggs instead, so that they can restore their invested calories, protein and energy. This means that the chickens are benefiting from their own production, rather than us.
We’ve all been conditioned to think of a chicken eating their own egg as strange, but chickens will actually do this anyway without any human intervention. In fact, if you type “chickens eating their own eggs” into any search engine you’ll be presented with almost nothing but advice articles and problem pages from farmers to try to get their chickens to stop doing this, or as they put it, to “break them out of this bad habit.” That “bad habit” being their natural way of regaining lost calories and energy from overproducing eggs. If you have hens and they don’t do this by themselves, cracking the shells will usually do it, otherwise chickens love to eat eggs mashed up or scrambled. Either way, feeding eggs back to the chickens means that they get to benefit from what they produce, rather than us taking it from them.
This concept that it matters who benefits from what hens produce is an important one, and it’s the primary reason why taking eggs from captive hens is unethical. An animal shouldn’t have to pay “rent” for their care, and they shouldn’t need to be exploited for us to keep them safe and healthy. Whether or not animals are being treated well is irrelevant, because their producing something for us to enjoy should not be a requisite for us maintaining their welfare. This is not a case of a symbiotic relationship, as is often claimed with animal farming, since chickens do not have the capacity nor the opportunity to enter into this relationship willingly, nor are they able to leave them if they would rather you didn’t take what they produce. Using another being for your own personal gain is clearly exploitation, and even if that isn’t the primary reason you keep chickens, we shouldn’t need to find ways to benefit from our relationships with animals in order to care for them properly.
Taking eggs from backyard hens is not even close to being the most significant animal rights issue in the world, but it is part of a wider narrative where animals are subject to us and it is okay to take from them whatever we want so long as it benefits us. Whether or not animals are being treated well is irrelevant, because their producing something for us to enjoy should not be a requisite for us maintaining their welfare. Considering the fact that chickens clearly benefit from eating their own eggs, taking them because we like the way they taste is a clear demonstration that we think that think of our desires and preferences as inherently more important than theirs. Rescued chickens should be pets and companions, treated no differently and valued no lower than our dogs or cats. It is not for us to decide that it is okay to take something from them which they make, which they spend energy and time producing, just because we like the way it tastes.
So in summary, what vegans object to in cases of either the commercial or back yard production of eggs or honey, is primarily exploitation. You can make all the arguments you want about how you don’t take all their honey (despite the fact that we both know some keepers absolutely do do that), or about how chickens produce eggs anyway, but it cannot reasonably be argued that we need to take anything from these animals. Bees should benefit from their own honey, and chickens should benefit from their own eggs; you can provide shelter and food for both birds and bees without ever making a profit from them. There are arguments which attempt to justify exploitation of these animals, but absolutely none which defend the necessity of it.
As vegans, we believe that animals are not ours to exploit for personal gain, and that we should not seek to profit from their bodies or what they produce. We don’t object to keeping bees or chickens, we only object to taking what is not ours. The idea that these animals require us to profit from their bodies in order to survive is a self-serving fantasy, that what is “best for them” just so happens to also be what is profitable for us is a convenient lie. Animals don’t need help from humans to fulfill their basic biological functions, they did just fine for a few millions years before we started exploiting them, and if given the chance, they’ll continue to do so long after we are gone.
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