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:
re: inspections—I would expect inspections to be net positive, they are inspecting for a reason, presumably this reduces disease risk? If it was harmful to production why would farmers do it?
re: honey harvesting − 1) my understanding is that the excess energy from honey is used by the hive to swarm/create new hives, so it seems like you could harvest down to what the hive needs to survive but not swarm and 2) it seems like hive starving is bad for the farmers too so I would presume that this is something they care about too. But I might be wrong! It would be good to see what the cost of hive replacement is, if that were super cheap relative to honey it would make sense that farmers wouldn’t care—but I feel like bees are somewhat expensive and hard to get. I’m not sure.
re: hives are bad—bees seem to prefer them to wild hives, freezing seems to be solvable via insulation, if I had to guess I’d say that these are probably much better to live in on balance than feral hives. (If the response is “wild bees are also net negative” I’d want to hear about how farmed bees impact wild pollinator populations)
re: malnourishment—I’m not totally sure this is true—I think I’ve heard that some honeybee providers require that farmers who work with them feed them only sugar because that had better outcomes than feeding honey, and this also seems like a case where farmers incentives are aligned with bee welfare (sick hives = less honey)
re: queens—seems bad but a small percent of overall bees.
transport is the strongest argument. But I think they are transported mainly for pollination reasons, not honey reasons—almonds, fruit, coffee etc will still need pollinators so I don’t know how much reducing demand for honey would actually reduce transport. It might even increase the invasiveness of transport because producers wouldn’t have an incentive to keep bee welfare high for honey production.
re: “bees have short lives so % of time dying is higher”—I don’t know. I’d want to get more evidence on this. I feel like the same argument could be applied to humans—we live 80 years on average, the last five are usually pretty bad (low mobility, mind goes, lots of physical issues, lots of pain) - but idk if I’d be comfortable saying it would be better if everyone died five years earlier. (to be clear: I’m very persuaded by “humans vastly underestimate how bad end of life is”—strongly recommend being mortal by atul gawande—but I wouldn’t say with much confidence that the last ~8% of life is net negative for most humans)
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.
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:
re: inspections—I would expect inspections to be net positive, they are inspecting for a reason, presumably this reduces disease risk? If it was harmful to production why would farmers do it?
re: honey harvesting − 1) my understanding is that the excess energy from honey is used by the hive to swarm/create new hives, so it seems like you could harvest down to what the hive needs to survive but not swarm and 2) it seems like hive starving is bad for the farmers too so I would presume that this is something they care about too. But I might be wrong! It would be good to see what the cost of hive replacement is, if that were super cheap relative to honey it would make sense that farmers wouldn’t care—but I feel like bees are somewhat expensive and hard to get. I’m not sure.
re: hives are bad—bees seem to prefer them to wild hives, freezing seems to be solvable via insulation, if I had to guess I’d say that these are probably much better to live in on balance than feral hives. (If the response is “wild bees are also net negative” I’d want to hear about how farmed bees impact wild pollinator populations)
re: malnourishment—I’m not totally sure this is true—I think I’ve heard that some honeybee providers require that farmers who work with them feed them only sugar because that had better outcomes than feeding honey, and this also seems like a case where farmers incentives are aligned with bee welfare (sick hives = less honey)
re: queens—seems bad but a small percent of overall bees.
transport is the strongest argument. But I think they are transported mainly for pollination reasons, not honey reasons—almonds, fruit, coffee etc will still need pollinators so I don’t know how much reducing demand for honey would actually reduce transport. It might even increase the invasiveness of transport because producers wouldn’t have an incentive to keep bee welfare high for honey production.
re: “bees have short lives so % of time dying is higher”—I don’t know. I’d want to get more evidence on this. I feel like the same argument could be applied to humans—we live 80 years on average, the last five are usually pretty bad (low mobility, mind goes, lots of physical issues, lots of pain) - but idk if I’d be comfortable saying it would be better if everyone died five years earlier. (to be clear: I’m very persuaded by “humans vastly underestimate how bad end of life is”—strongly recommend being mortal by atul gawande—but I wouldn’t say with much confidence that the last ~8% of life is net negative for most humans)
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.