30 Facts That People Had A Hard Time Accepting, As Shared In This Online Thread

What... am I?

Someone with standards as far as I can tell

Definitely not all bee keepers only take the excess, some replace it all with sugar water. Profit often trumps animal well being, anywhere in the food industry. There are definitely huge environmental benefits to bee keeping, but we don't need to take honey from the bees to do that. Instead of buying honey, you can buy cheap sugar for yourself, and all that money you saved on honey you could give to people to keep bees without stealing their honey. Taking away the honey is in no means necessary for bringing bees to places to polinate. Sheering sheep is a good comparison, if you think that's never traumatizing, read about the practice of mulesing (cutting away part of their flesh to protect from flystrike, instead of just breeding a breed that's less vulnerable to flystrike but produces a bit less wool. Luckily this is fading out), or check illegally filmed footage at sheep sheering places, animals are sometimes handled WAY too roughly, because working extra fast means more profit.

Maybe you do treat them great, and that's wonderful! But that doesn't mean everyone does. Why would bee keepers not necessarily treat their bees well? Because like everywhere in the food industry: you don't necessarily need animals to thrive, you just need them to be healthy enough to produce for you. People often make cost-benefit decisions: if it takes much more effort or money to let your animal thrive than to let them just be healthy enough to not create problems, people often choose profits over animal well being. And you also don't need all of them to survive, if it takes twice as much effort to make sure all of them stay alive, it's more cost-efficient to just keep more animals and ignore that some die. So in the food industry that is often chosen. I don't know about other countries, but in my country it was not uncommon to set fire to the bees at the end of the season, because it was cheaper to buy new ones next season than to feed them through winter. Edit: This was a response to smugdruggler (nice name!), but it shows up in the wrong place it seems.

Wow, you are dead-set on painting the worst image possible to suit your narrative, which is why it is terribly flawed. Sorry, but your entire rant about us terrible bee keepers goes down the drain when looking at our actual situation: We are not farmers. Most bee keepers do not do this a a full time job, because - and oh, the irony - it is NOT cost-effective. Unless you have hundreds of hives you can not live off of bee keeping. For the majority of us it is as a mix of a hobby and a second income. We have actual jobs which mostly have no relation to the bees at all. Which makes the entire situation fundamentally different. We also provide the best possible living condition for them because they have a job to do, they don't just exist and eat like lifestock.

Unfortunately you are right. It seems to be a case of treating the bees as a tool to do a job rather than treating them as living things. I hate this attitude towards any living thing. We need more backyard beekeepers. I was a little surprised by how interested all my neighbours are too, and they've all learned something, and mostly changed their attitude towards bees in general. (Thanks for the compliment on my username lol.)

I've had the exact same discussion here on Bored Panda before. There seems to be this weird horror movie picture of bee keepers in people's heads. Apparently we are terrible human beings who enslave bees, steal what they need to survive and leave the hive in shambles. As if wearing a huge bee keepers suit would turn us into ... hungry bears or something

Yeah I know what you mean. I've put a fair bit of time and effort into trying to change this kind of opinion. Interestingly, the reason that bee suits are light coloured is so the bees don't think we're a bear, one of their predators in the wild.

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It's not the bee keeper's job to keep all of them alive or keep them really healthy, it's their job to produce honey in a cheap way, because that's what we want to buy. So they only have to keep enough of them alive, and healthy enough to produce, not as healthy as they deserve. And like we see everywhere where animals are 'kept' in the food industry: money often trumps animal well being. It would take a lot of extra work (if it's even possible) to make sure that no bees die when taking the honey (you're basically a giant compared to their size) so we accept that a certain percentage dies. If it's more expensive to feed bees through the winter than to buy new ones, they can just set the whole group on fire and buy a new group of bees in the next season (used to happen a lot in the Netherlands, and is legally allowed). If it makes more money to take all the honey than to leave them enough for their best well being, they sometimes just leave them only sugar water because that's cheaper.

Could you just STOP?! All you are spewing are half truths and your personal hatred for the food industry. Stop propagating how bees are allegedly treated in your country as if it was the standard everywhere in the world.