S5E5: Honeybees - Exploited Labour and Sticky Ethics

In this Animal Highlight, fellow Virginia Thomas discusses honeybees and the ways in which they are exploited for their honey. She notes how much labour goes into making honey and the scale of the industry that relies on it. Because of the violence and exploitation in the industry vegans do not eat honey.

Recorded: 26 October 2023 

 Featured: 

• S6E5: Abolition with Gary Francione on The Animal Turn. 
• The Bees of the World by Charles D Michener.
• World Bee Day by the FAO. 
• Bees and the Politics of Honey by Virginia Thomas

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects
• Learn more about the team here. 

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• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
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A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Animal Highlights

Speaker 1 0:01

This is another iRaw podcast . We podcast to make the world a better place for animals .

Claudia Hirtenfelder 0:16

Welcome back to season five of the Animal Highlights , where we're focused on animals and politics . All the content from this season has been extracted from season six of the Animal Turn podcast , which is a season of the same name Animals and Politics . This season , my co-host will be Virginia Thomas , who's an environmental social scientist . She was previously also a research fellow with the Wellcome Trust-funded project from Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed

Introducing the Honeybee

Claudia Hirtenfelder 0:42

the Animals . In this animal highlight , virginia Thomas discusses honeybees and the ways in which they're exploited for their honey . She notes how much labor goes into making honey and the scale of the industry that relies on it . All right , hi , virginia , welcome back to the animal highlight . So who are we going to be focusing on today ?

Virginia Thomas 1:05

Well , in this animal highlight , I'm highlighting the honey highlight . So who are we going to be focusing on today ? Well , in this animal highlight , I'm highlighting the honeybee , because insects like bees are usually literally and figuratively beneath our gaze . We often don't notice or appreciate the things they do , including the things they do for us . Bees do a great deal for humans and I think they're one of the few insects that we do perhaps notice and appreciate , at least to some extent . But of course , as Gary has just been explaining , from an abolitionist standpoint , we shouldn't be exploiting what bees or other animals do at all .

Virginia Thomas 1:39

And honeybees are remarkable animals particularly because of their social organisation . Honeybees are remarkable animals particularly because of their social organisation . I should say that more than 20,000 species of bees have been identified and there's a huge amount of diversity among the species . Not all of them are social . Some of them , like the mining bee and the cuckoo bee , are solitary , but the honeybee is social and lives in colonies that can have tens of thousands of bees living together .

Virginia Thomas 2:19

And for social insects like the honeybee , the colony is a superorganism whose survival is particularly through the division of labour , which is determined through their caste system of female queens , male drones and female workers . The main role of queens and drones is to reproduce , to ensure the survival of their own colony in the case of the queen , and other colonies . In the case of the drones . In the case of the queen and other colonies . In the case of the drones , the workers do all the work of maintaining the colony cleaning , ventilating and guarding the nest , feeding and caring for larvae , building

Bee Communication and Social Structure

Virginia Thomas 2:54

wax comb cells , looking after the queen , foraging for and storing food and even feeding the drones . And , as you can imagine , communication is incredibly important to animals who live with so many others , and bees are famous for the way they communicate . They've developed a sophisticated system of dancing to share information about the location and quality of food with other members of the colony , which includes information based on calculations made in relation to the position of the sun .

Claudia Hirtenfelder 3:24

That's really cool . I think I've seen some of the videos of this dancing and it looks a bit like a like a wiggle and a jive . Is that right ?

Virginia Thomas 3:30

Yeah , it gets . It gets called the waggle dance sometimes , but actually I was reading for this it depends where the food is , If if the food's in one place , they do the waggle dance and if the food's in another place they do the circle dance . But I can't remember which way around it is . You have to be a bee to understand this kind of stuff .

Claudia Hirtenfelder 3:51

I love the idea that . I mean , I guess dancing is a form of communication , any which way you put it that , but yeah , the idea of bees dancing . You watch those videos and it's quite remarkable to just kind of see how they move and they know exactly what's happening .

Virginia Thomas 4:04

Yeah , yeah , I suppose you could say dancing is even a form of human communication , but it's much more crude than the sophisticated dance of the bee . Honeybees do two things that are particularly interesting to humans they pollinate plants and they make honey . Both of these things are natural honeybee behaviours and wild honeybees pollinate plants and make honey independently of humans , but over thousands of years , people have learnt to manage honeybee behaviour to exploit it more effectively

Pollination and Economic Impact

Virginia Thomas 4:38

for their own purposes . This started with an interest in keeping bees for their honey and also their wax , and a paper by Guy Bloch and colleagues suggests that there's evidence of beekeeping as early as the 10th century before the common era . Today , though , honeybees are perhaps even more important to people for their pollination of crops . Bees and other pollinators pollinate wild and domestic plants , and 35% of our crops depend on bees and other pollinators , making bees essential to crop production and human food security .

Claudia Hirtenfelder 5:13

Oh yeah , I've read a bunch of stuff with regards to that . I know that honeybees often kind of flag as these key pollinators , but also wasps flies a whole bunch of insects that we don't think of with regards to pollination . But yeah , it's incredible that our whole food system is reliant on these insects and their mobility and like the overlapping of how we eat and they eat .

Virginia Thomas 5:36

Yeah , yeah , and you're right , we do . I think bees are quite famous for it , but we do forget the other insect pollinators quite often . But there is a huge overlap between what you just said what they eat and what we eat , because in financial terms , it's estimated that bees contribute 22 billion euro a year to Europe's agricultural industry and 14 billion dollars a year in the US . But although this is very important to people , it's a very utilitarian , teleological way of thinking about these and this is something which the abolitionist standpoint which Gary was just describing would argue against . And Gary was also talking about veganism in relation to abolitionist views , and he described veganism as the avoidance of eating , wearing or using any animal product , which of course , includes honey and wax .

Virginia Thomas 6:35

And often , when people who aren't vegans think about dietary veganism , they remember meat , dairy products and eggs , but they might forget about honey . People knew some of the incredible figures associated with honey production . They might take bees and their exploitation by people more seriously

The Ethics of Honey Consumption

Virginia Thomas 6:55

. So over her entire life which is admittedly short , only only a few weeks a worker bee will make only 1 , 12th of a teaspoon of honey , and it takes 2 million visits to flowers to make 500 grams of honey , which is roughly the size of jars of honey that are sold in supermarkets . So , in terms of exploitation , think of the sheer scale of lives and work and effort that has gone into that small jar of honey which we take for granted .

Claudia Hirtenfelder 7:26

Yeah , thank you so much for mentioning that . Honey is something that trips people up quite readily when they're approached with veganism . I get asked it quite often . But you don't eat honey . It's a plant and it really does confuse folks , but it's because it is such . It's it's such an exploitative kind of product , and part of the reason being is it's not just that it requires a whole bunch of labor and effort for bees to produce the honey , right , like they expend enormous amounts of energy to create this which and their reserves to kind of sustain them over winter months and also for their young to eat , but it's because in industrial bee operations , what they also do is they replace this really rich , nutrient , rich honey with like a sugary syrup . Right , so the bees are getting fed , but they're getting fed with something that's much more deficient in terms of nutrition .

Claudia Hirtenfelder 8:16

And I think , if I'm not mistaken , there are and it's not it's not kind of proven unequivocally , but there's been a lot of like hive , what's the word I'm looking for ? It's hive collapse . A lot of hive collapses are happening , where just entire hives die or they disappear , and this is becoming a huge concern because , like you said , we rely quite heavily on bees , and it's not just us who rely on bees right , a lot of ecosystems are reliant on pollinators and , you know , colony collapse is really , really significant and important . Yeah , I mean , I could talk about this for ages . And it's not just that they're fate deficient , you know .

Claudia Hirtenfelder 8:54

You see , I don't know if you watched , when preparing for this , some of the videos of how the bee colonies are moved around in order to facilitate this pollination process . So you'll go to kind of places where there's massive monocropes , like where they farm almonds in California , for example , and you'll see trucks and truckloads of beehives so industrial beehives being driven around and they get parked , they open up so that the bees will go and pollinate and then they bring them back in and oftentimes , you know , queen bees are killed . Anyway , there's many , many reasons why it's not why vegans don't eat honey , and clearly , clearly I'm just going on a bit of a spewing , a spewing thing here , but thank you for for flagging that , because it is something I think that's part of generally an ethical vegan standpoint

Outro and Credits

Claudia Hirtenfelder 9:41

.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 9:41

So I appreciate it great thanks so much thank you so much to Virginia Thomas for being an incredible co-host and to Rebecca Shen for her work on the logo and all the artwork done with the animal highlight . The show was edited and produced by myself .

Speaker 1 10:10

This is the Animal Highlight with me , Claudia Hüttenfelder . For more great iRule podcasts , visit iRulePodcom . That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com .