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Herbalist wrote:I've heard both sides of the argument one states (i believe it does) that it destroys the bees system and their way of adapting to the environment after being in their artificial homes through bee keeping and the other argument on the opposite end of the spectrum is it provides a home and can help their population.
The argument that honey cultivation helps bees is even more absurd than the argument that leather helps cows.
Bees are kept primarily as pollinators for our commercial crops, not for honey. This pollination is an essential duty, and will happen whether people eat honey or not. It is from pollination service that huge beekeepers make most of their money. Honey is just an additional revenue stream that, for bees, adds injury by taking their hard earned food and replacing it with inferior products like sugar and mass produced pollen -- resulting in likely nutritional deficiency, and contributing to the problem of Colony Collapse.
Because Honey harvesting is likely injurious to bees (although modern commercial breeding of bees has managed to stabilize the population through replacement despite the population crashes taking honey probably contributes to), and because honey has roughly the nutritional qualities of high fructose corn syrup (it may actually be more dangerous, because it often also contains harmful bacterial contamination), it is better not to eat it. It is a myth, and marketing hype, that have deceived people into believing honey is healthy (like cow milk).
That said, bees are not cows in terms of level of sentience, so harm to bees is not something we should be fighting over while cows, chickens, and pigs are made to suffer and are being killed in immense numbers.
