Bees (honey)

To produce honey, commercial and industrial beekeeping practices involve numerous interventions on colonies. Here are the details, process variations, and specific elements regarding different species and regions of the world :

1. Artificial Insemination and Queen Selection

In intensive beekeeping and modern selective breeding (highly developed in North America, Europe, and Oceania), artificial insemination has largely replaced natural mating to control lineages.

• The Process : Drone bees (male bees, for example, honey bee species such as Apis mellifera) are captured and manipulated to manually extract their semen. The queen is forcibly immobilized in a tube (often called an isolation tube or containment tube) without being able to move, and the semen is then injected using a micro-surgical syringe.
• Commercial Shipping : Queens inserted into small wooden or plastic postal cages with a few nurse workers are sold and shipped internationally by mail. Shaking, temperature variations, and isolation cause a high mortality rate during transport.

2. Physical Mutilations : Clipping and Toxic Marking

• Wing Clipping : To prevent swarming (the natural departure of the queen and her colony to a new location), beekeepers (particularly in North America and Europe) cut off a portion of the queen's wings with scissors. If the queen tries to fly away, she falls to the ground and cannot follow her swarm.
• Chemical Marking : Queens are often immobilized to be marked on the thorax with a dot of oil-based or enamel paint (standardized by color according to the year). The solvents and volatile organic compounds in these highly toxic paints cause dizziness, severe headaches, poor coordination, impaired vision, and neurological damage in the insect, sometimes considerably reducing its lifespan.

3. Theft of Reserves and Substitution with Syrup

• Role of Honey : Honey is the vital source of energy and nutrients accumulated by bees to survive the winter or periods of dearth.
• Substitutes : When beekeepers harvest honey, they replace it with sugar syrup (sucrose), high-fructose corn syrup, or fondant mixtures. These substitutes lack the essential enzymes, amino acids, vitamins, and antioxidants naturally present in honey, which weakens the colonies' immune systems.

4. Harvesting Methods : Smoke and Mechanical Extractors

• Use of Smoke : In traditional and medium-scale beekeeping, beekeepers use a smoker. The smoke disrupts the bees' olfactory receptors and triggers a panic reaction (they gorge themselves on honey in anticipation of a fire). High-temperature smoke can damage their wings and permanently disorient them.
• Large-Scale Industrial Processes : In industrial operations (particularly in large production complexes in Australia, the United States, or South America), bee escape boards or industrial air blowers are favored to dislodge insects from the frames. When the frames pass through mechanical centrifugal extractors, many bees present on the combs are crushed or mutilated by the paddles and screens.

5. Winter Cull of Colonies (Destruction of Hives)

In certain regions with very harsh winters (such as cold areas of Canada or the northern United States) where the cost of syrup feeding and maintaining heated or protected hives exceeds the expected value of honey, commercial operators practice mass euthanasia of colonies in the autumn (often by carbon dioxide suffocation or freezing). Bees are destroyed simply to avoid having to feed them during the months without a nectar flow. Elsewhere, only the queen is periodically eliminated and replaced by a younger, more productive queen.

6. Global Ecological and Health Consequences

• Inbreeding and Weakening : Artificial selection practiced on Apis mellifera (as well as the importation of specific subspecies such as Apis mellifera ligustica or Apis mellifera carnica outside their native habitats) has led to a loss of genetic diversity and increased vulnerability to pathogens.
• Spread of Diseases : Industrial migratory beekeeping, which involves transporting millions of hives by truck over thousands of kilometers for intensive monoculture pollination (such as almonds in California), promotes the rapid transmission of viruses, fungi (such as Nosema), and deadly parasites (notably the Varroa destructor mite) to local and wild bee populations (such as bumblebees, carpenter bees, and solitary species).
• Misconception About Protection : Contrary to the popular belief that beekeeping protects bees, farming centered on Apis mellifera directly competes for floral resources with the thousands of wild bee species threatened with extinction.