Food is a wonderful thing, and what’s more wonderful is its infinite arrays and combinations waiting to be tried. Yet it is not a man-made thing, and was not crafted for us — a potato forms to store starch for its leaves, not to be sliced into chips, as perfectly adapted as it seems.
Humans are adept at wrangling the environment until it works for us; although the foods we enjoy did not evolve for people to eat them, through careful breeding over thousands of years we have yielded organisms that heed our will. It’s hard to refute that a rooster potato is free from human influence, when its very existence was brought about by us. From a watermelon, to a guard dog, to a cow, few forms of life have not had human tampering.
And tampering with the sentient varieties of life is where veganism comes into the picture. A diet that evokes intense emotions and debate in the public, the animal exploitation is the stronghold of the vegan movement. But whilst one can agree that meat is unfriendly to the environment and animal, where do bees fit into the picture?
Think of a bee product, and you probably thought of honey. It’s the main product of the apiary industry, but beeswax comes in second — being used in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and skin care. There’s also more niche product like propolis and royal jelly.
There is no Vegan Pope, so there is no complete consensus on what practices make bee-products unvegan, but well-recognised groups such as PETA and The Vegan Society cite removing and replacing honey, killing queens and clipping wings amongst others. Although bees are farmed on a large scale, it generates almost nothing compared to the meat industry — a measly $300 million compared to $864 billion in the US. Bees do not make enough for one country to produce exclusively native honey — save for the main global honey exporters, Turkey, China and South America. Supermarket honey will always be a mixture from different countries. Ireland simply does not produce enough honey for a commercially viable, 100% Irish product.
Honey harvesting uses a process known as extraction, which involves pulling out the honeycombs, cutting off the wax caps, and in the commercial productions, spinning the comb to separate the honey out.
Bees, of course, are protective of their honey, so methods to drive them away during extractions and inspections will invariably cause some deaths, more so in a commercial operation which deals with thousands of hives compared to a hobbyist’s dozen or less. New queens are killed to prevent swarming — there can only be one queen at a time, so once the old queen senses the virgin queen maturing, it will leave with half or more of the hive’s population. The swarming bees will gorge themselves on honey — about half in the hive — before they leave, so oftentimes the drop in food and population means the remaining beehive will not survive the cold winter. The only swarming prevention that involves killing is the pre-emptive destruction of queen cells. Clipping the queen’s wings means that if it swarms, it cannot travel far and the swarming brood will be easily gathered and put into a new box — swarms are the source of the childhood terror of a mass of bees hanging from a tree, though they are not generally aggressive. Queens are usually killed and replaced every 1-3 years, as hives only thrive with a younger queen. It’s worth noting that bees do this themselves when left to their own devices.
Although the practices of beekeeping are not harmful to the bees on any large scale, there is a moral argument for the exploitation of the insect. Honey, some argue, is being ‘stolen’ by humans. It’s important to lay aside any anthropomorphisms — arthropods and vertebrates have about 500 million years of evolutionary separation — as any attempt to apply human psychology to bees is ill-fated. Propolis, pollen, honey and wax all take a lot of labour to produce, but whether one considers this a deal breaker for bee’s vegan status is ultimately a personal decision, hinging on the value you ascribe to the extra labour of a bee.
Not all decisions made for beekeeping are made with the bee’s well-being in mind, something both vegans and non-vegans are implicated in.
Replacing the honey produced by bees with sugar water is common practice when the honey is over-harvested and the hive will starve as a result. The exact effects are unclear, as in name honey is no more than a sugary syrup with next to no nutrients, but increasingly we find traces of antibiotics, enzymes and other natural elements in honey important for the health of a bee’s immune system. Though frowned upon, it happens nonetheless, and is inevitable in commercial productions.
But a more worrying practice does not involve honey at all, but almonds. In large-scale agricultural production, particularly in the United States, beehives are hired out to pollinate massive monocultures of crops like almonds which are entirely bee-dependant for pollination. Shuttled across huge distances, subsisting on a poor diet of a single food source in an environment laden with pesticides and mixing with many other hives is a cocktail for sickly bees. It is no surprise, therefore, that this practice is attributed in part to Colony Collapse Disorder, the rapid and seemingly unexplainable sudden death of hives that threw bees into the public consciousness. Vegan or not, there is no escaping the role bees play in agriculture and their possibility for exploitation. The greater threat to bees across the world and in Ireland is the varroa mite, present in every bee colony in Ireland. Any beekeeper will tell you of the great pains controlling the mite is — without strong chemicals to keep an infestation under check, and specialised bee boxes and techniques, it can quickly take over a hive, weakening it until it collapses.
So it begs the question, in the face of rampant pesticides, monocultures and mite infestations, can honeybees survive without human help?
The short answer is that it’s unclear. The steep decline of over half of wild native species could suggest that beekeepers are numbing some of the ailments bees are inflicted with — such as keeping bees locked inside during pesticide spraying, mite management and maintaining genetic diversity — but a hive paired with a bad beekeeper is much worse than it braving the elements alone. Commercial beekeeping does not equal mistreatment and hobbyists equal benevolence, as with everything we eat, trying to understand how it was made and where it comes from gives us the power to support the practices we agree with.
Bees cut out a lot of products for vegans — popular honey alternatives include agave and malt syrup, and paraffins and other kinds of synthetic waxes replace the bee-made kind.
But agave syrup, and any plant-based syrup for that matter, uses pesticides which kill more insects than beekeepers could. Agave itself is a monocultured crop imported from Mexico. In our modern word of unsustainable agriculture, can we really argue that a pot of honey from down the road is more exploitative and environmentally harmful than syrup from plantations causing the very death of our pollinators?
