>The mean estimate was [that bees suffer] around 15% as intensely as people.
To clarify. Does this mean that when comparing:
The estimate implies that some people feel that the beehive is a worse moral problem? This strongly contradicts my moral intuitions.
No! It implies only that if you inflict some comparable injury on a human and bee (adjusting for e.g. bees diminshed size) the human will feel, on average (though lots of uncertainty), around 10X as much pain. Moral evaluation of this is something different!
It feels fairly alarming to me that this post didn't get more pushback here and is so highly upvoted.
I think it makes a couple interesting points, but then makes extremely crazy sounding claims, taking the Rethink Priorities 7 - 15% numbers at face value, when the arguments for those AFAICT don't even have particular models behind them. This is a pretty crazy sounding number that needs way better argumentation than "a poll of people said so", and here it's just asserted without much commentary at all.
(In addition to things other people have mentioned here, like the 97% number being very sus, and "why are we assuming they have net negative lives?", describing "10% as bad as a chicken" as a "conservative assumption" that's like basically made up. Also, it has some random political potshots that aren't really affecting the core claim but also seem bad for EA Forum culture)
This feels like sort of the central example of why EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem needed to get written. (disclaimer: I am close with the author of that post)
(By contrast it has negative karma on LessWrong. I have weak disagreement with Oliver there about whether it should be more like -9 karma or more like "-2 to 10", but it was at 85 karma when I found it here before me and a couple people strong downvoted and that seems like EA forum basically has no filter for poorly argued claims)
I basically disagree with this take on the discussion.
Most clearly: this post did generate a lot of pushback. It has more disagree votes than agree votes, the top comment by karma argues against some of its claims and is heavily upvoted and agree-voted, and it led to multiple response posts including one that reaches the opposite conclusion and got more karma & agree votes than this one.
Focusing on the post itself: I think that the post does a decent job of laying out the reasoning for its claims, and contains insights that are relevant and not widely considered/discussed, especially for readers who already (e.g.) think that fish matter to a non-negligible extent and are willing to avoid eating salmon because of that. It takes a lot more bee-days to make a serving of honey than salmon-days to make a serving of salmon, and when Rethink Priorities looked into moral weights they found as about as strong a case for bee sentience/welfare as they did for carp or salmon. So the claim that one should avoid eating honey for basically the reasons given in the post seems like a plausible hypothesis, especially conditional on the views that lead many EAs to avoid eating factory farmed chicken or salmon, and it seems good that people are thinking through that claim.
I don't buy this post's conclusion, for reasons that are pretty well covered in existing responses. And I agree that there are some epistemic problems with the way it lays out its arguments, such as using a kilogram-to-kilogram comparison instead of serving-to-serving, incorrectly claiming that RP found that bees display "every" behavioral proxy of consciousness, and its choices about when to label estimates as being "conservative". And it's not good that these all point in the same direction, of overstating the case for avoiding honey.
So we at least have a fair amount of agreement about the post itself. But turning it into an exhibit of a general EA-vegan-specific problem feels like a stretch, especially given the response it has received. And even just considering the post by itself, there are posts which have gotten a positive reception on LW that I've found to be worse-argued than this. (Though perhaps that could be flipped around to say that there are some bad epistemic patterns in both intellectual subcultures.)
This post did generate a lot of pushback. It has more disagree votes than agree votes, the top comment by karma argues against some of its claims and is heavily upvoted and agree-voted, and it led to multiple response posts including one that reaches the opposite conclusion and got more karma & agree votes than this one.
I agree that this somewhat rebuts what Raemon says. However, I think a large part of Raemon’s point—which your pushback doesn’t address—is that Bentham’s post still received a highly positive karma score (85 when Raemon came upon it).
My sense is that karma shapes the Forum incentive landscape pretty strongly—i.e., authors are incentivized to write the kind of post that they expect will get upvoted. (I remember Lizka[1] mentioning, somewhere, that she/the Forum team found (via user interviews?) that authors tend to care quite a lot about karma.) So, considering how Bentham’s posts are getting upvoted, I kind of expect them to continue writing similar posts with similar reasoning. (Further, I kind of expect others to see Bentham’s writing+reasoning style as a style that ‘works,’ and to copy it.)
The question then becomes: Is this a good outcome? Do we want Forum discourse to look more like this type of post? Is the ‘wisdom of the EA Forum voting crowd’ where we want it to be? (Or, conversely, might there be an undesirable dynamic going on, such as tyranny of the marginal voter?) I have my own takes, here. I invite readers to likewise reflect on these questions, and to perhaps adjust your voting behaviour accordingly.
our former Forum Khaleesi
On the 7-15% figure I don't actually see where the idea that smaller, less intelligent animals suffer less when they are in physical pain is commonsense comes from. People almost never cite a source for it being commonsense, and I don't recall having had any opinion about it before I encountered academic philosophy. I think it is almost certainly true that people don't care very much about small dumb animals, but that, but there are a variety of reasons why that is only moderate evidence for the claim that ordinary people think they experience less intense pain:
-They might not have ever thought about it, since most people don't feel much need to give philosophical justifications for banal, normal opinions like not caring much about animals.
-Hedonistic utilitarianism is not itself part of commonsense, but without assuming it, you can't quickly and easily move from "what happens to bees isn't important" to "bees have low capacity for pain."
-We know there are cases where people downgrade the importance of what happens to subjects who they see as outside of their community, even when they definitely don't believe those subjects have diminished capacity for pain. Many ordinary people are nationalists who don't care that much about foreigners, but they don't think foreigners feel less pain!
-They might just assume that it is unlikely small simple animals can feel pain at all. This doesn't necessarily mean they also think that, conditional on small simple animals being able to feel pain they only feel it a little bit.
Independently of what the commonsense prior is here, I'd also say that I have a PhD in the philosophy of consciousness, and I don't think the claim that less neurons=less capacity for pain is commonly defended in the academic literature. At most some people might defend the more general idea that how conscious a state is comes in degrees, and some theories that allow for that might predict bee pains are not very conscious. But I've never seen any sign that this is a consensus view. In general, "more neurons=more intense pains" seems to play badly with the standard functionalist picture that what makes a particular mental state the mental state it is, is it's typical causes and effects, not its intrinsic properties. Not to mention that it seems plausible there could be aliens without neurons who nonetheless felt pain.
taking the Rethink Priorities 7 - 15% numbers at face value, when the arguments for those AFAICT don't even have particular models behind them. This is a pretty crazy sounding number that needs way better argumentation than "a poll of people said so", and here it's just asserted without much commentary at all.
I'm confused by this statement. The welfare range estimates aren't based on a "poll" and are based on numerous "particular models."
taking the Rethink Priorities 7 - 15% numbers at face value, when the arguments for those AFAICT don't even have particular models behind them
I'm interested to hear what you think the relevant difference is between the epistemic grounding of (1) these figures vs. (2) people's P(doom)s, which are super common in LW discourse. I can imagine some differences, but the P(dooms) of alignment experts still seem very largely ass-pulled and yet also largely deferred-to.
If you want to read the longer defense of the RP numbers, you can read the RP report or my followup article on the subject https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-cant-tell-how-conscious-animals. Suffice it to say, it strikes me as deeply unwise to base your assessments of bee consciousness on how they look, rather than on behavior. I think the strong confidence that small and simple animals aren't intensely conscious rests on little more than unquestioned dogma, with nothing very persuasive having ever been said in its favor https://benthams.substack.com/p/betting-on-ubiquitous-pain. Also the RP report wasn't a poll!
I agree about the 97% number and have corrected it! I think the point made by the number--many more bees than e.g. fish--is correct, but I failed to add the relevant caveats.
Regarding 10% as bad as chicken, that still strikes me as pretty conservative. I think bees spend much of their time suffering from extreme temperatures, disease, etc, and thinking that's 10% as bad as the life of an average chicken (note: this is before adjusting for sentience differential) strikes me as pretty conservative.
The argument for insects mostly living bad lives is given in the linked post and in this post--if you live a super short life (days or weeks) you don't get enough welfare to outweigh the badness of a painful death.
The reason it has political potshots is that it was originally a blogpost and I just added it here. If I were writing it specifically for the forum, I wouldn't have added that--but I also am somewhat irritated by the EA forum culture where it feels like you have to write like you're making an academic paper rather than having any whimsy or fun!
Thanks for sharing this, and please forgive my very basic question: is there anything stopping bees from flying away? If they choose to be in managed hives, that seems like it presents some evidence they prefer them over making their own.
It turns out, these managed hives, they're just un-bee-leave-able.
While I don't completely agree with the post[1], I think "the bees can simply fly away" is not a strong objection.
When they need a new hive location, they follow basic instincts which selects the location based on how much room it has, how well sheltered it is, competition (maybe), etc. They are incapable of deducing "oh this new location is in a tree, if we set up a hive here then the unpleasant treatment from humans will stop, because tree holes are natural and have no doors for humans."
They have rudimentary planning abilities but zero understanding of humans.
I'm no expert but my guess (and partially confirmed by some googling) is that they've been bred for docility/traits that make them more likely to stay rather than leave. o3 also suggests:
Absconding (leaving the hive) is triggered by intense stress: chronic overheating, prolonged food dearth, heavy predator or beekeeper disturbance, or severe parasite loads (notably Varroa)
I agree, and find animal preferences an interesting question. Sometimes it seems there's the claim that animals like bees are super intelligent/sentient yet on the other hand they choose to live a life of higher suffering in a beehive than they would in the wild?
I'm not sure we can have our cake and eat it too - but wonder what others think.
When I made this point in my response post, people pointed out that in some cases the queen's wings are clipped to prevent the entire colony from leaving. This doesn't strictly prevent all the bees from leaving; an older queen can send out princesses ("virgin queens") with a fraction of the rest of the hive in a practice known as "swarming." However, it does limit the possibility of all of the bees leaving en masse ("absconding").
I couldn't figure out quickly how common wing-clipping is. My current guess is that it is not very common (in this beekeeper subreddit post, some beekeepers claimed to have never heard of it[1]). However I have high error bars and this is indeed cruxy for how much autonomy and exit rights managed honeybees in practice have.
This is unfortunately less evidence than it may initially sound. It could still be one of those common cases in factory farming where the majority of farmers have very different experiences than the majority of farmed animals, because (unlike with HR departments managing humans) it's very possible that Big Bee has on average worse practices than small hobbyist beekeepers who are both more active online and more charismatic.
I believe it is a relatively common beekeeping practice to clip a wing of the queen bee to prevent the colony leaving
Thanks for writing this! Changed my mind.
I do wonder if there are certain brands or sources where the bees are treated well. I imagine ones that go outside to find natural food sources. My grandparents kept a couple of bee hives and they seemed pretty good. The vast majority of the time they're just living a natural lifestyle, which is most likely what they've evolved to enjoy.
On that note, I've found that o3 is really good for researching the welfare of various animal products. Here's what I just did for the honey at my house (TLDR; I won't be buying it again).
You maybe be right but I still disagree, mainly because focusing on personal abstinence of insect derived products is a very slippery slope. For example: If you were to agree with this you will need to rethink consumption of several insect pollinated plant based foods. Many of these require industrial scale trucking of bees think avocados, almonds etc (See Image Below). Avoiding these in my opinion are impractical for an average person.
Additionally I also think getting into this debate is a strategic mistake if we want to people take one step towards compassion. As put forth by THE Dr. Michael Greger 20 years ago here.
I think there is probably a pretty strong moral reason to abstain from those but honey provides much stronger reasons. Disagree on strategy--people really like bees!
If some crops are much better for insect welfare than others, then I want to know about that.
I agree that it's too onerous to avoid harm in everything you do. But I think the correct way to handle it isn't to ignore the harm; it's to figure out which actions you can take that have the best ratio of harm reduction to personal hardship, and then do those.
It may be that the answer turns out to be something weird like "don't worry about dairy, but do avoid pumpkins and melons".
Thanks for the post, Matthew!
If you eat a kilogram of beef, you’ll cause about an extra 2 days of factory farming.
I estimate eating 1 kg of beef also decreases the living time of soil nematodes, mites, and springtails by 564 M animal-years for feed crops replacing tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas, and shrublands. Moreover, for this replacement, and my best guess those soil animals have negative lives, I estimate buying beef at a cost of 6.32 $/meat-kg is 63.8 % as cost-effectice as the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) has been.
I do not understand why you are neglecting effects on wild invertebrates considering you recommended donating to GiveWell to decrease their population.
They are far more cognitively sophisticated than most other insects, having about a million neurons—far more than our current president.
This is false - humans have billions of neurons - and also seems completely pointless, achieving nothing except unnecessarily alienating some readers.
eh I agree it's out of place and the alienation's not worth the benefits, but I still think it's mildly funny (similar to Eliezer's random New Atheism potshots at religion, which as a modern reader feels childish and unnecessary, but mildly funny for all of that).
It's been a long time since I read the sequences, but religion seems much more relevant to rationality - and especially to the historical process that lead to it - than Trump's cranial contents are to bee welfare. Thinking about analogies from the sequences, this post seems much more apt.
Also, if we want more people cross posting good content, we will want to be cognizant that the Forum reader was not the original intended audience for crossposted material. So the cost/benefit analysis could be different for the original audience (although I suspect it was not materially different here).
Holy **** this was one of those things that changed my mind just by looking at the title because I realised I was holding a belief that was clearly mistaken if you think about it logically for a second, but no one actually ever really challenged me on it. Why did I never realise that honeybees are obviously the most farmed animal on earth?
I always told people that farmed honey is terrible, but terrible in the same way as that dairy is terrible. I would have put the order of 'plz stop eating this for the love of god' at
I will bump honey up the list (50% vibes based list by the way, not calibrated on exact SAD/portion).
PS: Would have been easier if you listed '#days of farming' per 'per capita consumption' rather than per kilo. 1kg is roughly the yearly consumption per person in Europe I believe (surprisingly high?), vs 20kg for chicken. Also, the link to the 97% thing didn't work, so I couldn't really check that stat. (It seems oddly specific given uncertainty)
The link (which does work for me, perhaps try another browser) is to an archive of a 2018 article by Jiwoon Hwang which has a table with numbers of different animals, and states "1 trillion animals exist due to humans, 97% attributable to honey". As Bentham's Bulldog and the link itself caveats, this is not true, simply because the table does not include any other farmed insects. There were 1-1.2 trillion insects farmed to be eaten by humans or animals in 2020, plus many more silkworms and cochineals. @Jason Schukraft estimated "that at any given time in 2017 there were between 1.4 and 4.8 trillion adult managed honey bees", for comparison. Below is the calculation from Jiwoon Hwang:
Data for honey bees:
FAOSTAT, Livestock Primary, World, Production Quantity, Honey, natural, 2014 (http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QL) : 1,510,566 tonnes
“How much honey does the average worker honey bee make in her lifetime? – 1/12 teaspoon.” (https://www.honey.com/newsroom/press-kits/honey-trivia)
Density of Honey: 1.36 kg/l (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Nutritional_and_sugar_profile)
Estimated average lifespan of honey bees: 4 months (25-35 days summer, 6-8 months winter)
(Amdam, Gro Vang, and Stig W. Omholt. “The regulatory anatomy of honeybee lifespan.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 216.2 (2002): 209.)
Calculation:
World Honey Production 2014: 1,510,566,000,000 grammes. (1,510,566 tonnes * 1000 * 1000)
One teaspoon: 5mL (metric, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaspoon#Metric_teaspoon)
One teaspoon of honey: 6.8 gramme (5mL * 1.36 kg/L)
Honey per honey bee: 0.56666666666667 gramme (6.8 gramme * (1/12))
Honey lifetimes per year: 2,665,704,705,882 (1,510,566,000,000/0.56666666666667)
Honey years per year: 888,568,235,294 (2,665,704,705,882 * (4/12))
Edit: note that the 97% number also doesn't include shrimp.
Thanks for the reply :) the number you cite for other insects is yearly turnover, not how many are alive at any moment, right? So the number might not be as far off?
But yeah, without looking at any data, other major farmed insects numbers are probably increasing at a faster rate than honeybees.
Ah yes, so I guess the comparison is roughly 1-1.2 trillion other insects yearly (2020), versus 4.2-14.4 trillion honeybees yearly (2017). So, 7-29% as many as the number of honeybees.
(Multiplying 1.4-4.8 trillion honeybees alive at one time by 3 to get the annual number, because of the 4 month average lifespan).
Executive summary: This impassioned and data-driven essay argues that honey consumption likely causes vastly more animal suffering than any other commonly consumed animal product—due to the sheer number of bees affected and the severe harms they endure—making honey ethically worse than even factory-farmed meat or foie gras.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
I prefer the Claude Opus summary, which makes it easier to argue against:
Here's a distillation of the original argument in premise/conclusion format:
P1: Eating 1kg of honey causes ~200,000 days of bee farming (vs. 2 days for beef, 31 for eggs)
P2: Farmed bees experience significant suffering (30% winter mortality, malnourishment from honey removal, parasites, transport stress, invasive inspections)
P3: Bees are surprisingly sentient - they display all behavioral proxies for consciousness and experts estimate they suffer at 7-15% the intensity of humans
P4: Even if bee suffering is discounted heavily (0.1% of chicken suffering), the sheer numbers make honey consumption cause more total suffering than other animal products
C: Therefore, honey is the worst commonly consumed animal product and should be avoided
The key move is combining scale (P1) with evidence of suffering (P2) and consciousness (P3) to reach a mathematical conclusion (P4→C) that honey causes more total suffering despite individual bees mattering less than larger animals.
Crosspost from my blog.
(I think this is a pretty important article so I’d appreciate you sharing and restacking it—thanks!)
There are lots of people who say of themselves “I’m vegan except for honey.” This is a bit like someone saying “I’m a law-abiding citizen, never violating the law, except sometimes I’ll bring a young boy to the woods and slay him.” These people abstain from all the animal products except honey, even though honey is by far the worst of the commonly eaten animal products.
Now, this claim sounds outrageous. Why do I think it’s worse to eat honey than beef, eggs, chicken, dairy, and even foie gras? Don’t I know about the months-long torture process needed to fatten up ducks sold for foie gras? Don’t I know about the fact that they grind up baby male chicks in the egg industry and keep the females in tiny cages too small to turn around in? Don’t I know, don’t I know, don’t I know?
Indeed I do. I am no fan of these animal products. I fastidiously avoid eating them. In fact, I think that factory farming is a horror of unprecedented proportions, a crime, a tragedy, an embarrassment, a work of Satan himself that induces both cruelty and wickedness in those involved and perpetrates suffering on a scale so vast it can scarcely be fathomed. I can be accused of many things, but being a fan of most animal products is not one of them.
But I assure you, honey is worse (at least in expectation).
If you eat a kilogram of beef, you’ll cause about an extra 2 days of factory farming. It’s 3 days for pork, 14 for turkey, 23 for chicken, and 31 for eggs. In contrast, if you eat a kg of honey, you’ll cause over 200,000 days of bee farming. Of all the farming years brought about by the honey, chicken, cow, sheep, turkey, duck, pig, and goat farming industries, 97% have been brought about by honey.
If honey is bad, therefore, it is likely to be very bad! If we assume a day of bee life is only .1% as bad in absolute terms as a day of chicken life, honey is still many times worse than eating chicken (at least, if you eat similar amounts). As we’ll see, taking into account serious estimates of suffering caused makes honey seem many times worse than all other animal products, so that your occasional honey consumption could very well be worse than all the rest of your consumption of animal products combined.
Let’s first establish that bees in the honey industry do not live good lives. First of all, their lives are very short. They live just a few weeks. They die painfully. So even putting aside grievous industry abuse, their lives aren’t likely to be great. Predation, starvation, succumbing to disease, and wear and tear are all common.
Second of all, the honey industry treats bees unimaginably terribly (most of the points I make here are drawn from the Rethink Priorities essay I just linked). They’re mostly kept in artificial structures, that are routinely inspected in ways that are very stressful for the bees, who feel like the hive is under attack. Often, the bees sting themselves to death. In order to prevent this, the industry uses a process called smoking—lighting a fire, sending smoke into the hives, to prevent alarm pheromones from being detected and the bees from being (beeing) sent into a frenzy. Sometimes, however, smoking melts the wings of the bees. Reassembly of the hive after inspections often crushes bees to death.
These structures, called Langstroth hives, also have poor thermal insulation, increasing the risk of bees freezing to death or overheating. About 30% of hives die off during the winter, meaning this probably kills about 8 billion bees in the U.S. alone every single year. The industry also keeps the bees crammed together, leading to infestations of harmful parasites.
Oftentimes, beekeepers take too much honey and leave all of the bees to starve to death. This is a frequent cause of the mass bee die-offs that, remember, cause about a third of bee colonies not to survive the winter. Because beekeepers take honey, the bees main source of food, bees are left chronically malnourished, leading to higher risk of death, weakness, and disease. Bees in the commercial honey industry generally lack the ability to forage, which exacerbates nutrition problems.
Bees also undergo unpleasant transport conditions. More than half of bee colonies are transported at some point. Tragically, “bees from migratory colonies have a shorter lifespan and higher levels of oxidative stress than workers at stationary apiaries.” The transport process is very stressful for bees, just as it is for other animals. It also weirdly leads to bees having underdeveloped food glands, perhaps due to vibration from transport. Transport often is poorly ventilated, leading to bees overheating or freezing to death. Also, transport brings bees from many different colonies together, leading to rapid spread of disease.
Honey bees are often afflicted by parasites, poisoned with pesticides, and killed in other ways. Queen bees are routinely killed years before they’d die naturally, have their wings clipped, and are stressfully and invasively artificially inseminated. This selective breeding leaves bees more efficient commercially but with lower welfare levels than they’d otherwise have. Often bees are killed intentionally in the winter because it’s cheaper than keeping them around—by diesel, petrol, cyanide, freezing, drowning, and suffocation.
So, um, not great!
In short, bees are kept in unpleasant, artificial conditions, where a third of the hives die off during the winter from poor insulation—often being baked alive or freezing to death. They’re overworked and left chronically malnourished, all while riddled with parasites and subject to invasive and stressful inspections. And given the profound extent to which the honey industry brings invasive disease to wild bees and crowds out other pollinators, the net environmental impact is relatively unclear. The standard notion that honey should be eaten to preserve bees is a vast oversimplification.
Thus, if you eat even moderate amounts of honey, you cause extremely large numbers of bees to experience extremely unpleasant fates for extremely long times. If bees matter even negligibly, this is very bad!
Indeed, bees seem to matter a surprising amount. They are far more cognitively sophisticated than most other insects, having about a million neurons—far more than our current president. Bees make complex tradeoffs between pain and reward, display pessimism, show recognition of their bodies, make transitive inference (which some philosophers don’t do), and dream. Rethink Priorities notes bees have been shown to display every behavioral proxy of consciousness, including:
The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!
If we assume conservatively that a bee’s life is 10% as unpleasant as chicken life, and then downweight it by the relative intensity of their suffering, then consuming a kg of honey is over 500 times worse than consuming a kg of chicken! And these estimates were fairly conservative. I think it’s more plausible that eating honey is thousands of times worse than eating comparable amounts of chicken, which is itself over a dozen times worse than eating comparable amounts of beef. If we assume very very very conservatively that a day of honey bee life is as unpleasant as a day spent attending a boring lecture, and then multiply by .15 to take into account the fact bees are probably less sentient than people, eating a kg of honey causes about as much suffering as forcing a person to attend boring lectures continuously for 30,000 days. That’s about an entire lifetime of a human, spent entirely on drudgery. That’s like being forced to read an entire Curtis Yarvin article from start to finish. And that is wildly conservative.
I feel I’ve already repeated my shtick often enough about the badness of pain being because of how it feels, so I won’t repeat it in detail. Headaches are bad because they hurt, not (entirely at least) because the people having them are smart. Causing staggeringly, mind-blowingly large quantities of animal pain is bad because pain is bad. Unpleasant experiences are unpleasant. And while in practice we don’t take seriously bee interests, they’re complex, likely able to suffer, and surprisingly intelligent. It’s not okay to mass starve and roast such creatures just because they’re small. If you wouldn’t be fine doing such things to larger creatures with similar behavior, you shouldn’t be fine doing them to bees.
So don’t eat honey! If you eat honey, you are causing staggeringly large amounts of very intense suffering. Eating honey is many times worse than eating other animal products, which are themselves bad enough. If you want to make an easy change to your diet to prevent a lot of the suffering that you cause, please, for the love of God, avoid honey.
(You wouldn’t hurt this little guy, would you?)
I agree with most of the post but am not sure about the "farmed honeybees live net negative lives" component. It seems like the strongest arguments from here + the RP report are 1) honeybee lives are short (so % of life spent dying is larger) and 2) the transport = stressful argument. Other than that:
Also, honeybees have lower infant mortality rates than mammals, the behaviors of farmed bees seem reasonably close to what they would do in the wild (no gestation crates, they still fly out, find food, come back, colony culture exists, etc). I would say that bees probably have one of the highest baseline lives of any creature in the world. They have a lower infant mortality rate than pre-industrial revolution humans. They'd probably be top 0.01% of animals I'd most want to be to be reborn as. I'm wondering if your threshold for which animals have net negative lives is much lower than mine - where do (farmed or wild) honeybees rank vs other wild (or farmed) animals, in your opinion? Was the life of a pre-industrial revolution human better or worse than a modern honeybee?
The two things that would make me change my mind are 1) learning more about the prevalence/magnitude of a negative aspect of farming bees (I could be persuaded that transport is bad enough to outweigh everything else, for example) or 2) if I had a much stronger prior on negative utilitarianism for animals (e.g. if large mammals have on average net negative lives then honeybees likely would as well).
I also agree that bees are charismatic, but I think a "bee welfare" advocacy strategy (insulate hives in winter, less invasive inspections, no transport) would be a better sell. Overall these issues seem much more solvable and low stakes than other insect/fish/bird/mammal factory farming. But I could be wrong!
Without being an expert in any way. I often feel that animals have net-positive lives when others think they don't. I think part of it is because I don't think the potential extreme distress of movement/harvesting/starving necessarily outweighs other positive experiences of bees and potentially other wild animals. It depends on how bad those shorter times of extreme distress really are.
Also because animals kept here in Northern Uganda just seem pretty happy most of the time. Obviously they're roaming free and not factory farms.
But its so hard to know.