Dr. Sulekh Chand Jain
Many Jains and nearly all vegans avoid the use of honey because it is an animal product that involves himsa to the insects (bees) that produce honey. It is reasonable to draw an analogy to milk production.
In fact, just like milk, honey is the dairy of the insect world.
Today, there are hundreds of medicinal and eatable products (including many cereals, cookies, biscuits, juices, and spreads) that contain honey.
Honey can be produced by honeybees in the wild or in honeybee farms, but most honey comes from full-time factory bee farmers. The bees swallow nectar into their crop, regurgitate it, add enzymes (in their saliva), chew, swallow, and repeat many times. This is neither a pretty nor appetizing picture.
In the course of cultivating repeated hives, humans select a successor queen instead of allowing the reigning queen to continue. Both of these are likely to have been artificially inseminated. Beekeepers replace the queen every two years, instead of allowing her to live out her natural life and reign. “Replace” is a euphemism for killing the old queen. Backyard beekeepers also regularly kill their queens. This is done for numerous reasons that all boil down to exerting control over the hive. For example, it is done to prevent swarming, aggression, mite infestation, and to keep honey production at a maximum. For backyard or small-scale beekeepers, queens come from commercial queen suppliers and during their shipment, nearly anything can happen. Queens can be over heated, chilled, left out in the sun for hours (desiccated), banged about, and killed.
There is often a lack of regard for the bees’ lives. In the US, 10 to 20 percent of colonies are lost over the winter. This is partly by accident and partly on purpose. Some beekeepers kill off their hives before winter. This practice can make economic sense. Unfortunately, this is not done by the small backyard beekeeper, but rather by the large factory bee farmer, so a lot of bees are killed even if most beekeepers don’t use the practice. Also, in the process of checking up on the hive and taking the honey, some bees get squashed by the farmers or stepped on. Bees who sting the keeper in defense of their home necessarily die. If two colonies are combined, the queen of the weaker colony is killed. So that the honey can be easily removed from the comb, it is often warmed prior to removal. In the warming room, bees find themselves trapped with no escape, and either die naturally or are “disposed” of by beekeepers.
There is no doubt that beekeeping, like dairy farming, is cruel and exploitative. The bees are forced to construct their honeycombs in racks of trays, according to a human-made design that standardizes the size of each hexagonal chamber. Queens are imprisoned in certain parts of the hive, while colonies are split to increase production and sprinkled with prophylactic antibiotics. In the meantime, keepers control the animals by pumping their hives full of smoke, which masks the scent of their alarm pheromones and keeps them from defending their homes and honey stores. And, of course, since the bees aren’t making the honey for us, our removal of it from the hive could be construed as a form of theft. Real maple syrup is a good alternative.
Anyone who eats honey but avoids milk is making the tacit assumption that the pain experienced by a bee counts for something less than the pain experienced by a cow which is a fallacy. A bee feels no less pain than any other animal or insect.
Clearly honey is a product of himsa.
You can make a difference. Of course it’s not always enough to avoid eating something. Why not let companies know you’re not buying their products because they have honey in them? This is a particularly urgent issue in the “health food” area since there are an increasing number of products containing honey that would otherwise be vegan.
You decide; is use of honey consistent with ahimsa?
