I’m having a weird glitch where I can’t leave a normal comment but in short:
I agree you should take into account both well-being and suffering.
//Conditional upon believing that bees are likely to suffer intensely, you should probably also believe that bees are also capable of feeling pleasure intensely.//
In humans, the most intense suffering vastly outweighs the most intense pleasures. And the most intense pleasures are probably unable to be experienced by a bee.
If well below 1% of R-selected species reproduce, it seems really unlikely that in expectation they get more pleasure than all the animals that suffered. I might write a longer thing about the linked post at some point.
Bees probably do enjoy helping the hive, but from their behavior when they’re crushed to death, it’s pretty clear that they suffer. You can just look at how distressed honey bees behave when they sting you.
It’s true bees can abscond but:
1) Often they clip the honey bee’s wings so they can’t abscond.
2) Often the bees are frequently relocated, leading to disorientation that makes it harder to abscond.
3) Plausibly most of the painfulness of their life comes shortly before death—even if their day to day life is pleasant, they’re overall life is likely net negative.
4) Bees only tend to leave when conditions are very bad.
5) They’ve bread for docility, reducing absconding risk.
A juvenile mortality rate of 30% is still decently high! That means that about a third of them die very shortly after birth—and even of the ones that don’t, they mostly live pretty short (a few months at the high end). When you consider how bad bee deaths likely are and how frequently they endure very unpleasant conditions, I think their lives being net negative is pretty obvious! I’d be at like 2/3 on it.
Regarding wild insects, my guess is bees provide pollination that increases plant productivity and raises the total number of wild insects.
Amusingly, if you think insects live positive lives and that eating honey decreases insect populations, then you shouldn’t eat honey!
On elasticity, this shouldn’t affect things by more than a pretty small factor.
I agree with the point about wing clipping. I think this is bad. I’d be interested in learning how frequent that practice is, as well as documented cases/prevalency of attempted absconding in those cases (and swarming with baby queens).
“Regarding wild insects, my guess is bees provide pollination that increases plant productivity and raises the total number of wild insects.
Amusingly, if you think insects live positive lives and that eating honey decreases insect populations, then you shouldn’t eat honey!“
I’m deeply uncertain about this question but my central estimate for wild insects (and wild animal welfare in general) hovers around zero with high error bars. I don’t think there is consensus but I’d guess that this is also a common if not the most common position among wild animal welfare researchers who don’t have negative-leaning normative commitments.
I haven’t read their paper, but I had a conversation with someone presenting the model. I tend to think that with questions this fuzzy, formal models are likely to be unreliable!
Yeah I totally agree. I think of the value of those models are more about laying your intuitions out and making them more crisp, and less about their actual conclusions.
“In humans, the most intense suffering vastly outweighs the most intense pleasures. And the most intense pleasures are probably unable to be experienced by a bee.“ This is directly addressed in the r-/K- selection argument section.
“Regarding wild insects, my guess is bees provide pollination that increases plant productivity and raises the total number of wild insects.“ What’s your model for almond farmers who can’t get honeybees on their farm? They just cry and give up? They settle for lower plant productivity crops? I think the argument here is wildly insufficient.
what happens to the remaining land when the almond farming contracts? They’re not going to pave it over with asphalt as a shrine to the goddess of negative utilitarianism.
>Regarding wild insects, my guess is bees provide pollination that increases plant productivity and raises the total number of wild insects.
luckily this is an area of active research so no guessing required. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is settled, the balance of research so far indicates that domestic honeybees decrease wild pollinator populations through a combination of disease and competitive foraging:
There is probably not a general answer to that question. They are relatively indiscriminate pollinators, but some plants are highly specialized and can’t be pollinated (or pollinated well) without particular insects. Honeybees likely increase pollination rates on average by doing more pollination of the (majority) of plants that they can pollinate, but might decrease pollination of some specific plants.
I’m not sure how this question is relevant though. Regardless of whether they are increasing pollination rates, the evidence suggests that this is not leading to increases in wild pollinators. My guess is that, to whatever extent they are increasing pollination, plant numbers are mostly not pollination rate limited, and to whatever rate they are pollination limited, honeybees are able to increase their numbers more rapidly than wild pollinators (which are usually solitary), and can just use up any increased pollen/nectar production, and that is before you consider disease spread.
If they increase pollination overall then I’d expect greater plant growth to lead to more insects in total. And if not, it’s unclear why people purchase them.
Bees are either used in places where natural pollination is not relevant to the number of plants (industrial ag), and there aren’t many wild pollinators anyways, or else in places where the pollination is not the point, and wild pollinators might have been more than sufficient, but that’s not what is desired (honey production). It is this latter case where they have detrimental impacts on wild pollinators. In the former case, there are no wild pollinators left to affect.
“eusocial insects have evolved over 100+ million years to find colony-beneficial work inherently rewarding, while solitary insects lack these evolutionary pressures for positive welfare”
This is a little unclear to me. Wouldn’t solitary insects equally evolve to find the work of gathering or consuming food rewarding?
yeah the wording isn’t very precise here. Totally agree that solitary insects ought to find gathering and consuming food rewarding. One difference on positive welfare is that hive activity probably allows for a broader range of positive welfare activities. A key difference in negative welfare is the worst things possible for a solitary insect (evolutionarially) is death and other sealing off of reproductive opportunities(and the activities leading up to it), which most solitary insects will experience during its lifetime (not strictly all since you can imagine some dying painlessly/instantaneously while sleeping or something). In contrast, the worst experience possible for a eusocial insect is hive death, an activity the vast majority of eusocial bees will never experience (since worker bees live much shorter lives than hives; iiuc some hives even outlive their initial queens!). But the language in my post is imprecisely stated, will edit later.
I think there’s something directionally there to it but I also don’t find evolutionary arguments very useful when it comes to humans, whether we’re thinking about incentives or welfare …we just have much more direct sources of evidence!
“Beekeepers are further incentivized to keep their hives living and healthy, which likely is a positive contributor to farmed bee welfare.”
Come now.. have you met chickens? Welfare and health/survival are sufficiently misaligned that given the incentives are actually not even to maximise health/survival but to produce at the lowest cost (which means in many cases sacrificing health when the cost savings are worth it), we should NOT expect that bees/chickens have good lives simply because dead/unhealthy animals incur a cost
“The case for farmed bees is dissimilar to the case of (e.g.) farmed broiler chickens or pigs. Because farmed chickens are used only for their meat, the incentives of the farmers are to cram them with as much food as possible and for the chickens to grow as fast as possible. They do not need to be happy (unless happier animals taste better, and I think there is little to negative empirical evidence of this). The pain-pleasure signaling mechanisms are almost completely irrelevant to caged animals since their display of complex behavior is incidental to their use as farmed animals, while for bees it's critical.“
Apologies, that’s what I get for not finishing it. Perhaps bee welfare and profitable production are more aligned than chickens, but it’s important to note that so long as they’re not perfectly aligned, industry will trade off welfare to increase profitable production.
The internal research from Ambitious Impact’s research team finds many welfare issues in honey farming.
I’m not saying it’s as bad as chicken farming. I’m not saying I agree with Bentham it’s the worst animal product.
But I think the evidence is good that eating honey is probably NOT fine.
I appreciate your post though and apologies again for skimming
Appreciate the apology! <3 I don’t dispute that there are likely to be many welfare issues in honey farming, or that there are many things you can do to improve them. I’d be excited to see Ambitious Impact’s research team’s work on this, especially if they have object-level recommendations at a finer grain of detail than the 2019 RP report.
However, the central point of contention imo for whether honey consumption is fine is whether honeybees have net positive welfare.
I think this is somewhat unclear but more likely to be true than false, while BB thinks it’s more likely to be false than true.
Whether beekeepers have positive incentives to improve bee welfare is evidence on this, while being clearheaded and understanding also that they have other incentives in other directions, in addition to incentives being only one line of evidence among several.
Does the exit rights argument really hold? Queens are kept captive by wing-clipping, as i understand it, because bees will not abandon their queen easily. It’s more akin to a hostage situation than free immigration.
I don't understand how these arguments make sense for the claim being advanced here. Individual bees are not of significant value, colonies are. Plenty of individual bees can be crushed/lost to predation/whatever without impacting their profits.
You say that beekeepers have an incentive to keep the colony alive, and the colony can just leave if it's unhappy. But none of that prevents harm to individual bees. Don't a bunch of them get crushed when the hive is being disassembled/reassembled, or just get sick or die of old age?
I’m having a weird glitch where I can’t leave a normal comment but in short:
I agree you should take into account both well-being and suffering.
//Conditional upon believing that bees are likely to suffer intensely, you should probably also believe that bees are also capable of feeling pleasure intensely.//
In humans, the most intense suffering vastly outweighs the most intense pleasures. And the most intense pleasures are probably unable to be experienced by a bee.
If well below 1% of R-selected species reproduce, it seems really unlikely that in expectation they get more pleasure than all the animals that suffered. I might write a longer thing about the linked post at some point.
Bees probably do enjoy helping the hive, but from their behavior when they’re crushed to death, it’s pretty clear that they suffer. You can just look at how distressed honey bees behave when they sting you.
It’s true bees can abscond but:
1) Often they clip the honey bee’s wings so they can’t abscond.
2) Often the bees are frequently relocated, leading to disorientation that makes it harder to abscond.
3) Plausibly most of the painfulness of their life comes shortly before death—even if their day to day life is pleasant, they’re overall life is likely net negative.
4) Bees only tend to leave when conditions are very bad.
5) They’ve bread for docility, reducing absconding risk.
A juvenile mortality rate of 30% is still decently high! That means that about a third of them die very shortly after birth—and even of the ones that don’t, they mostly live pretty short (a few months at the high end). When you consider how bad bee deaths likely are and how frequently they endure very unpleasant conditions, I think their lives being net negative is pretty obvious! I’d be at like 2/3 on it.
Regarding wild insects, my guess is bees provide pollination that increases plant productivity and raises the total number of wild insects.
Amusingly, if you think insects live positive lives and that eating honey decreases insect populations, then you shouldn’t eat honey!
On elasticity, this shouldn’t affect things by more than a pretty small factor.
I agree with the point about wing clipping. I think this is bad. I’d be interested in learning how frequent that practice is, as well as documented cases/prevalency of attempted absconding in those cases (and swarming with baby queens).
(FWIW my current guess is that it’s not very common)
“Regarding wild insects, my guess is bees provide pollination that increases plant productivity and raises the total number of wild insects.
Amusingly, if you think insects live positive lives and that eating honey decreases insect populations, then you shouldn’t eat honey!“
I’m deeply uncertain about this question but my central estimate for wild insects (and wild animal welfare in general) hovers around zero with high error bars. I don’t think there is consensus but I’d guess that this is also a common if not the most common position among wild animal welfare researchers who don’t have negative-leaning normative commitments.
Again you should read or skim Freitas-Groff and Ng (though unfortunately I didn’t reread it before writing my post): https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/correcting-a-model
I haven’t read their paper, but I had a conversation with someone presenting the model. I tend to think that with questions this fuzzy, formal models are likely to be unreliable!
Yeah I totally agree. I think of the value of those models are more about laying your intuitions out and making them more crisp, and less about their actual conclusions.
“In humans, the most intense suffering vastly outweighs the most intense pleasures. And the most intense pleasures are probably unable to be experienced by a bee.“ This is directly addressed in the r-/K- selection argument section.
Thanks for the very fast reply!
“Regarding wild insects, my guess is bees provide pollination that increases plant productivity and raises the total number of wild insects.“ What’s your model for almond farmers who can’t get honeybees on their farm? They just cry and give up? They settle for lower plant productivity crops? I think the argument here is wildly insufficient.
If bees are more expensive and less plentiful, there will obviously be less almond farming at the margins!
Keep going…
what happens to the remaining land when the almond farming contracts? They’re not going to pave it over with asphalt as a shrine to the goddess of negative utilitarianism.
The main effect will be creating non-honey bees for polliantion and having somewhat lower crop yields.
>Regarding wild insects, my guess is bees provide pollination that increases plant productivity and raises the total number of wild insects.
luckily this is an area of active research so no guessing required. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is settled, the balance of research so far indicates that domestic honeybees decrease wild pollinator populations through a combination of disease and competitive foraging:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666515822000154
But do they decrease aggregate pollination?
There is probably not a general answer to that question. They are relatively indiscriminate pollinators, but some plants are highly specialized and can’t be pollinated (or pollinated well) without particular insects. Honeybees likely increase pollination rates on average by doing more pollination of the (majority) of plants that they can pollinate, but might decrease pollination of some specific plants.
I’m not sure how this question is relevant though. Regardless of whether they are increasing pollination rates, the evidence suggests that this is not leading to increases in wild pollinators. My guess is that, to whatever extent they are increasing pollination, plant numbers are mostly not pollination rate limited, and to whatever rate they are pollination limited, honeybees are able to increase their numbers more rapidly than wild pollinators (which are usually solitary), and can just use up any increased pollen/nectar production, and that is before you consider disease spread.
If they increase pollination overall then I’d expect greater plant growth to lead to more insects in total. And if not, it’s unclear why people purchase them.
Bees are either used in places where natural pollination is not relevant to the number of plants (industrial ag), and there aren’t many wild pollinators anyways, or else in places where the pollination is not the point, and wild pollinators might have been more than sufficient, but that’s not what is desired (honey production). It is this latter case where they have detrimental impacts on wild pollinators. In the former case, there are no wild pollinators left to affect.
But I’m not talking about the impact on wild pollinators, but instead the impact on total insect numbers as a result of boosting plant productivity!
“eusocial insects have evolved over 100+ million years to find colony-beneficial work inherently rewarding, while solitary insects lack these evolutionary pressures for positive welfare”
This is a little unclear to me. Wouldn’t solitary insects equally evolve to find the work of gathering or consuming food rewarding?
yeah the wording isn’t very precise here. Totally agree that solitary insects ought to find gathering and consuming food rewarding. One difference on positive welfare is that hive activity probably allows for a broader range of positive welfare activities. A key difference in negative welfare is the worst things possible for a solitary insect (evolutionarially) is death and other sealing off of reproductive opportunities(and the activities leading up to it), which most solitary insects will experience during its lifetime (not strictly all since you can imagine some dying painlessly/instantaneously while sleeping or something). In contrast, the worst experience possible for a eusocial insect is hive death, an activity the vast majority of eusocial bees will never experience (since worker bees live much shorter lives than hives; iiuc some hives even outlive their initial queens!). But the language in my post is imprecisely stated, will edit later.
This makes me wonder if in humans, death is a much worse experience for those without kids.
I think there’s something directionally there to it but I also don’t find evolutionary arguments very useful when it comes to humans, whether we’re thinking about incentives or welfare …we just have much more direct sources of evidence!
(edited the section after your question; thanks again for engaging!)
“Beekeepers are further incentivized to keep their hives living and healthy, which likely is a positive contributor to farmed bee welfare.”
Come now.. have you met chickens? Welfare and health/survival are sufficiently misaligned that given the incentives are actually not even to maximise health/survival but to produce at the lowest cost (which means in many cases sacrificing health when the cost savings are worth it), we should NOT expect that bees/chickens have good lives simply because dead/unhealthy animals incur a cost
“The case for farmed bees is dissimilar to the case of (e.g.) farmed broiler chickens or pigs. Because farmed chickens are used only for their meat, the incentives of the farmers are to cram them with as much food as possible and for the chickens to grow as fast as possible. They do not need to be happy (unless happier animals taste better, and I think there is little to negative empirical evidence of this). The pain-pleasure signaling mechanisms are almost completely irrelevant to caged animals since their display of complex behavior is incidental to their use as farmed animals, while for bees it's critical.“
Apologies, that’s what I get for not finishing it. Perhaps bee welfare and profitable production are more aligned than chickens, but it’s important to note that so long as they’re not perfectly aligned, industry will trade off welfare to increase profitable production.
The internal research from Ambitious Impact’s research team finds many welfare issues in honey farming.
I’m not saying it’s as bad as chicken farming. I’m not saying I agree with Bentham it’s the worst animal product.
But I think the evidence is good that eating honey is probably NOT fine.
I appreciate your post though and apologies again for skimming
Appreciate the apology! <3 I don’t dispute that there are likely to be many welfare issues in honey farming, or that there are many things you can do to improve them. I’d be excited to see Ambitious Impact’s research team’s work on this, especially if they have object-level recommendations at a finer grain of detail than the 2019 RP report.
However, the central point of contention imo for whether honey consumption is fine is whether honeybees have net positive welfare.
I think this is somewhat unclear but more likely to be true than false, while BB thinks it’s more likely to be false than true.
Whether beekeepers have positive incentives to improve bee welfare is evidence on this, while being clearheaded and understanding also that they have other incentives in other directions, in addition to incentives being only one line of evidence among several.
The analogy to chickens is directly addressed in the post.
ok I love that we've written a couple of similar articles
Does the exit rights argument really hold? Queens are kept captive by wing-clipping, as i understand it, because bees will not abandon their queen easily. It’s more akin to a hostage situation than free immigration.
My impression is that wing-clipping isn't very common, iiuc. You can also have swarming behaviors where some of the hive leave with a new queen.
I don't understand how these arguments make sense for the claim being advanced here. Individual bees are not of significant value, colonies are. Plenty of individual bees can be crushed/lost to predation/whatever without impacting their profits.
Can you be more specific? It's hard to know which argument you disagree with, and why.
You say that beekeepers have an incentive to keep the colony alive, and the colony can just leave if it's unhappy. But none of that prevents harm to individual bees. Don't a bunch of them get crushed when the hive is being disassembled/reassembled, or just get sick or die of old age?