I feel compelled to explain the misconception part for anyone who doesn’t know anything about beekeeping and finds any of this confusing. This might be a little redundant, but I’m scratching an itch.
Harvesting honey does not murder bees.
The device pictured above does not mash up bees or their hives.
There’s no ethical concern when it comes to eating honey, it’s totally ethical as food is concerned.
Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.
When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.
It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.
Like, there’s no need to have a conversation about this, anyone who claims that harvesting honey requires that you kill bees is lying. Either they don’t know anything about beekeeping and are just repeating a lie someone else told them, or they know that they’re lying and they’re just straight up trying to deceive people. Neither is a good look.
