• Produced by bees- surely you cannot have a moral objection to raising bees?!

    I do. They're perfectly capable of rubbing along by themselves. Beekeeping by humans quite often results in whole colonies being killed, for instance to stop the spread of disease, which is transmitted more easily by intensive bee-keeping. It's essentially a form of cruel intensive farming.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/aug/24/honeybee-deaths

    The association also believes beekeepers took more care to feed colonies where necessary to prevent them starving.
    'Feed colonies', when they're proverbially busy all summer to collect nectar and make honey for the winter--I find 'replacing' the honey with inferior and inadequate food quite perverse and objectionable, even if it's 'only' bees--insects that aren't very similar to us and therefore less likely to evoke moral feelings than the mistreatment of, say, a Great Ape.

    I've always loved bees--I find them fascinating and beautiful, and I really would rather we left them alone. I can fully understand people farming them in poorer times and places, but there is really no justification for that any more given what we know and can do now. If we came to rely on naturally-occurring and spreading bee colonies again, this would also require a major change back to a more natural landscape, away from the artificial biodiversity deserts that cover a lot of western countries (and vice versa--a change back to a more natural landscape would require more natural bee population patterns).

    The Vegan Society have a leaflet, but I don't actually think it's that good--it provides some more information, though.

    http://www.vegansociety.com/uploadedFiles/References_and_Resources/Downloads/Honey.pdf

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