A typical honey bee hive is a busy place, home to one queen, hundreds of drones and thousands of worker bees. The queen’s main job is to lay eggs—up to 250,000 a year. Drones serve the queen, while worker bees handle everything else, like gathering nectar and pollen, building comb and keeping the hive clean and safe.
Bees are surprisingly intelligent and self-aware. Studies show they can solve problems, recognise family members, form memories and map their travels. They also have fascinating ways of communicating—using sight, movement and scent. Their famous ‘dances’ share details about food, hive conditions and new locations with the rest of the colony.
There are about 20,000 species of bees worldwide, but only a small number actually make honey. Honey bees produce it to feed their colony through the winter since, unlike other bees, they don’t hibernate.
Worker bees gather nectar from flowers and bring it back to the hive, where they transform it into honey. While nectar provides their food in summer, honey becomes their lifeline once plants stop blooming. Making honey is no small feat—each bee visits up to 1,500 flowers and, over its entire lifetime, produces just one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.
Profiting from honey requires the manipulation and exploitation of the bees’ desire to live and protect their hive. Like other factory-farmed animals, honey bees are victims of unnatural living conditions, genetic manipulation and stressful transportation.
To meet demand, commercial beekeepers selectively breed bees to be more productive, which reduces genetic diversity and makes them more vulnerable to disease. As a result, hives are often treated with antibiotics–which can end up in the honey we eat. In some cases, entire hives are burned to manage infestations.
During honey collection, many commercial beekeepers take more than just the ‘surplus’, replacing it with sugar substitutes. This puts bees at risk because honey contains vital nutrients that they can’t get from sugar. Queen bees often have their wings clipped to stop them from leaving to start new colonies, which would lower productivity and profits. Post-harvest, some hives are even destroyed to cut costs.
Plants make nectar to attract pollinators like bees, which help produce 75% of the world’s food crops. But some of the practices used in industrial beekeeping actually harm the pollinators we depend on.
For example, honey bee hives are often transported on trucks to pollinate farms. This spreads diseases to wild pollinators, like bumble bees, which are already struggling because of habitat loss and pesticides. Honey bees also compete with wild pollinators for nectar and pollen, making it even harder for native species to survive.
When large numbers of honey bees are brought into an area, they can throw ecosystems out of balance by disrupting natural pollination patterns and putting extra pressure on local plants and animals. This all adds up to a bigger loss of biodiversity.
Honey is essential for bees, not humans. It does not contain any essential nutrients that cannot be obtained from a plant-based diet, and its taste and texture are easily replicated. Great alternatives include agave nectar, maple syrup, molasses and date syrup. You can also find ‘bee-free’ vegan honey, as well as vegan lip balms and candles.
What about backyard bees?
Keeping backyard honey bees reinforces the mindset of valuing animals for what they provide, rather than for who they are. It also poses a threat to wild bees through disease transmission and competition for resources, similar to commercial beekeeping practices. Experts recommend that if people want to support wild bee communities, growing native flowers, avoiding pesticides and providing nesting sites are more effective than keeping honey bees.
