Is honey vegan?

The objection

“Bees aren’t harmed by beekeeping, if anything it helps pollinators. Honey is the one animal product with nothing wrong with it.”

The answer

Honey is the gentlest case on this site, but a hive still loses food it made for itself when its honey is taken, and more hives can make life harder for the wild bees that are in decline.

Why isn’t honey vegan?

Honey isn’t vegan because bees make it from nectar as the colony’s own food store, and beekeeping takes it from them. The UK’s Vegan Society says honey doesn’t fit its definition of veganism, which seeks to exclude exploitation as well as cruelty [1]. The British Beekeepers Association advises beekeepers that a colony needs about 20kg of stores for the winter, so they should avoid taking off too much, and after the harvest has them check those stores and feed thick sugar syrup, then fondant from October, where the bees run short [2]. The Honey Association, a UK honey trade body, says bees make more than they need, so people can share it, and puts one worker’s lifetime output at a twelfth of a teaspoon [3].

The harm is small, and it is also unnecessary. Arguing that beehives should be kept out of conservation areas, the authors of a 2022 review of the research noted that honey may be essential food for honeybees but is not essential for humans [4]. Whether “only a little exploitation, because the animal is very small” is a principle you would accept anywhere else is the question of where to draw the line.

Does beekeeping harm the bees?

Beekeeping can harm bees, for example through the sugar fed to colonies left short of honey and the handling of their queens. Sugar syrup supplies energy but lacks compounds that honey carries from pollen and propolis. In a 2013 laboratory study, one of them, p-coumaric acid, switched on honeybees’ detoxification genes and, added to a sugar diet, sped up their breakdown of a common in-hive mite treatment by about 60% [5]. The compound comes mainly from pollen, a staple of bees’ natural diet, and the authors drew a cautious conclusion, that honey substitutes such as high-fructose corn syrup may leave bees less able to cope with pesticides and disease [5].

Queens are handled as well. A 2022 “In the Apiary” column on the British Beekeepers Association’s website calls April the time of year to clip queens by taking off a quarter of one wing, which some beekeepers do because a swarm then can’t leave until a new queen is flying [6], and the association’s calendar has beekeepers decide each April whether older queens need replacing [2]. Whether a bee can suffer from any of this is covered in whether insects feel pain.

Does buying honey help save the bees?

Buying honey doesn’t help the bees that are in trouble, because honeybees are farmed and their numbers are rising. A 2021 review of global records found that managed honeybee colonies had increased by 85% since 1961, mainly in Asia, despite average winter losses since 2007 of 26% in North America and 16% in Europe [7]. The bees in decline are wild ones, and the 2022 review names loss of habitat as the likely main driver, with disease and perhaps managed bees adding to it [4].

Dense beekeeping can add to that pressure. Geldmann and González-Varo warned in Science (2018) that high densities of managed honeybees can harm populations of wild pollinators [8]. The 2022 review, which covers both managed and introduced bees, found that 66% of studies of competition reported negative effects on wild bees [4], up from 53% in a 2017 review [9]. Most of those studies measured flower visits and foraging; only a few measured wild bees’ breeding success, and most of those found harm [4]. Of the studies on disease, 79% reported that managed or introduced bees could harm wild ones by passing on pathogens [4]. These figures pool honeybees with commercial bumblebees and include places where either was brought in from abroad. Where managed bees are native, as honeybees are in Europe, the 2017 review found smaller effects through competition but possibly larger ones through disease [9].

Skipping honey to save the bees misfires too if the bees meant are managed honeybees, which are not in decline [4]. For wild bees the link runs through money, because honey earns about half of the honeybee industry’s income in the US and about 80% in Australia, more than pollination does, and so pays for many of the hives that wild bees compete with [4].