That’s all well and good but specifically all forms of farming kills hundreds of times more insects than beekeeping does as a byproduct to protect crops from pests and untold numbers of rodents and insects are destroyed by the act of soil preparation, even barring any attempts at pest control. The fact is, your single little patch of organic farm to produce enough vegetables to keep you alive for a year requires the deaths, and therefore suffering of many more organisms than beekeeping does. If you have a different calculation, I would love to see it, but quite honestly I think it is going to be self justifying.
That’s a good point, that farming also causes large numbers of insects to die whether we bring bees in or not. The post seems to argue that bees in particular are smarter/more important than other insects though. I’d also expect in a most cases that bees are being brought to farms, not wild fields, so the (alleged) suffering of bees is on top of the suffering of other insects on the farm, not an alternative to it. Although, maybe once you’ve done the work of preparing a field, having bees produce honey from it is less bad than preparing additional fields.
That’s all well and good but specifically all forms of farming kills hundreds of times more insects than beekeeping does as a byproduct to protect crops from pests and untold numbers of rodents and insects are destroyed by the act of soil preparation, even barring any attempts at pest control. The fact is, your single little patch of organic farm to produce enough vegetables to keep you alive for a year requires the deaths, and therefore suffering of many more organisms than beekeeping does. If you have a different calculation, I would love to see it, but quite honestly I think it is going to be self justifying.
That’s a good point, that farming also causes large numbers of insects to die whether we bring bees in or not. The post seems to argue that bees in particular are smarter/more important than other insects though. I’d also expect in a most cases that bees are being brought to farms, not wild fields, so the (alleged) suffering of bees is on top of the suffering of other insects on the farm, not an alternative to it. Although, maybe once you’ve done the work of preparing a field, having bees produce honey from it is less bad than preparing additional fields.