i feel like this is the same for other animal products. for a lot of them there is an ethical way of sourcing them, which costs more and you would need to reduce your consumption of it. but this extreme view on veganism and animal products confuses me.
1. I don't need honey or other animals products to live an healthy and happy life but there's many people that think the opposite. Some of those honey consumers care too about bee condition and satisfy a part of their consumption with the "ethical" products. Not buying those products will let them have access the market with more ease by not putting more pressure on the price and the quantity available. I understand one person choice has a very small impact, but it's the same as with voting.
2. I recognize many small beekeeper treat their bees way nicer than the industrial one, and that they genuinely love their hives. However love isn't the question when you think about ethics: culture, habits and customs have very important weights in our actions. There's absolutely not doubt more than 13% of Egyptian parents deeply love their child, however most of them practice a very questionable and invasive tradition on their girl [0]. I think small-shop honey production is still an exploitation of another species: the bees didn't come by themselves and sometimes the queen is captive in a special room. harvesting their honey is a theft: they didn't produce it for us humans. It's not always very natural either: some beekeeper give them white sugar during winter - which helps keeping them alive - but they would probably have chosen to keep the honey instead. The smoke usage attest of the not-so-cooperative process, it's at most a forced-symbiosis.
I too feel like it's the same for other animal products.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-genital-mutilation...
t-3•7mo ago
1/3 of colonies dying in winter sounds bad, and is certainly inefficient from an agricultural perspective, but wild hives don't have better survival rates. Parasites are an issue mostly due to beekeepers historically favoring breeds which were fine before mites were a big problem but don't have good grooming behaviors to deal with the modern situation. Due to higher productivity and "that's how we've always done it", they still use those slovenly breeds.