Vegetarians Eat Honey?

I’m doing a lot of reading on bees in preparation for adding two hives.  One of the things I’m learning is that raising bees involves killing a lot of bees.  

Bees die on their own, of course, and from a host of parasites and diseases, to say nothing of starvation and raids from mice, skunks, raccoons, bears, wasps, and other bees.  

In addition, weekly hive inspections to check for disease and parasites can easily result in bees getting crushed between frames, to say nothing of the occasional defensive stings that result in bee mortality when stingers and venom sacks pull out and eviscerate the defending bees.

And then there’s intentional mortality as part of Varroa mite inspection. 

The quite common routine here is you take a half cup of bees (about 300) and dump them in a jar with alcohol, which kills the bees.  After leaving the bees in the alcohol for 2-4 minutes, you swish the bees and alcohol around, drain bees and alcohol into a filter, and then count the number of dead adult Varroa mites that have dislodged from the bees. Calculations then determine whether you treat the hive for Varroa mites, continue monitoring, or engage in tricky hive management involving splitting the hive and adding a queen.

Some may argue bees are not sentient creatures, but any animal that makes and saves food, migrates, air conditions, heats, posts guards, teaches, gives directions, makes complex mathematics-based structures, defends against invaders, and has a host of hierarchical jobs within its humming factory, is provably intelligent in my book.

Which is not to say bee mortality has me too concerned.  

Stuff dies, and we eat meat.  

Stuff dies, even if all we eat is vegetables.  

Last night, I helped a neighbor retrieve a shot deer up near the house.  No problem, and I am not sentimental.  Life is a complex web.

But that perspective is not always shared by vegetarians. 

Does the vegetarian who ignores worms killed by the plow, and snakes ground up in the combine, and lost trees that once stood where soybeans now grow, wonder what happens to chickens after that sentient egg-producing machine has dried up? 

Do they wonder how many bees live to produce honey and fertilize crops, and how many die in the cycle of those same endeavors?

Some vegans, I am told, do not eat honey because it comes from an animal.  

OK, but is the mortality that occurs when sugar cane fields are set on fire, or when corn and beets are harvested *less* than it is from bees?  

I don’t know.  

All I know, is it’s not even close to zero.

All I know is that behind every vegetarian is a vegan asking “how can you wear shoes,” and behind every vegan is me, asking them (and everyone else) to have fewer kids.

Chase any problem on this planet around, from global warming to water pollution, from species loss to fisheries collapse, and you will find too many people is the root of the problem.

When bees get too crowded, a hive will make a second or third queen and split off a swarm to find a new location.

But where will we humans swarm off to?  Mars?  

Hell, we can’t even manage this planet!