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.
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.