Signs of Fall 9: Eggs and Honey (Foods for Thought)!

(Click on the following link to listen to an audio version of this blog …. Eggs and Honey

New Hampshire red hen. Photo by Bodline. Wikimedia Commo

A number of years ago, I attended a lecture by a fellow faculty member at the Penn State Campus where I taught for 34 years. The lecture was about the ethical treatment of chickens kept to produce eggs. The lecturer was a friend, a philosophy professor and also a part-time farmer who, among other agricultural activities, raised chickens and harvested their eggs. I don’t  remember all of the points he made about the egg-producing chickens, but his presentation convinced me that paying more for eggs made by cage-free chickens was a small price to pay to allow these animals to live a more normal life.

According to the Humane Society of the United States the vast majority of egg-laying hens in the United States are confined in enclosures called “Battery Cages.” A Battery Cage has 67 square inches of space per hen and usually contain between four and ten birds. The chickens live in this confined space and lay their eggs on the tilted bare, screen-mesh floor. The eggs roll down the inclined floor of the cage and are collected. Then after living in this hellish space for one or two years, the hens are slaughtered and used to make pet food or protein meal for animal feed.

(Battery cage. Photo by Maqi, Wikimedia Commons)

In the Battery Cage there is no room for the hen to spread her wings, no opportunities to engage in stress-reducing behaviors like perching or dust bathing, and no opportunity to find any degree of solitude during the egg-laying process. The “bottom line” advantage of the Battery Cage production system is cost and convenience: eggs are produced cheaply although at a staggering cost to the hens.

Brown eggs. Public domain

I checked my local Kroger’s store for their egg prices. A dozen, large, white eggs cost $1.89. I assume that these eggs were produced in Battery Cage systems. Eggs labeled as “cage-free” ranged in price from $3.49 to $5.99 for a dozen eggs. These eggs were produced in systems that might have included barn or building floor space for the chickens or real, outside barnyards or field habitats.Cage-free egg production systems lessens some of the most egregiously tortuous aspects of egg production. The hens are able to walk and run around. They can spread their wings and are able to lay their eggs in a nest with some degree of privacy. It costs more to maintain the chickens in a cage-free system and the collection of eggs is more labor intensive, but although managing animals for food has inherent aspects of cruelty, minimizing that cruelty should be important to us all.

Interestingly, there may be some other benefits to cage-free egg production. Recent research has shown that Salmonella levels are significantly lower in cage-free or free range eggs. Chemical residues from pesticides are also lower in cage-free and free-range eggs. Further the eggs raised in these non-Battery Cage systems are higher in many important nutritional factors including vitamin A, vitamin E and Omega 3 fatty acids! The reduced stress on egg-laying hens is thought to have a significant impact on the chemical composition of the eggs.

Honeybee. Photo by C.J.Sharp, Wikimedia Commons

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are wild insects that have become ensnared in human agricultural practices but have, according to most bee scientists, never actually been domesticated. A very interesting research focus on honey bees explores how free-living honey bees live as opposed to honey bees that are kept in human-made hives.

Honey bees are extremely important in human food producing systems. These bees, of course, make honey, but, more significantly, they are critical pollinators for many different types of plants! According to Dr. Gabriola Chavarria the former Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Science Center and Science Advisor to the Director for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service) bees pollinate 30 percent of the world’s crop plants and 90 percent of the world’s wild plants.

The need for honey bee pollinators, often at a very specific time in the development of a crop and often for just a few short weeks, has increased right along with increased productivity of our industrial agricultural systems! This growing need for honey bees has led to the development of an industry in which billions of hived honey bees are trucked about on flatbed trailers from one end of the country to the other in order to accomplish each region’s and each crops’ essential pollination. Along this yearly circuit of bee transportation the bees are also taken to areas where they can rest, recover and reproduce, but in spite of this, according to the non-profit “Bee Informed Partnership,” about forty percent of these industrial bee colonies die each and every calendar year.

The causes of the bee colony deaths are varied: the stress of transport, the exposure to high load of pesticides and herbicides in the agricultural fields, infections with viruses and infestation with mites probably interact synergistically to kill off the colonies. The cost of this colony death rate is staggering, and this cost gets passed on to everyone who contracts with the bee industries for assisted pollination.

Photo by Jonathunder. Wikimeida Commons

A recent article in The New Yorker (August 21, 2023) explored “natural beekeeping” and compared it to more conventional methods of bee husbandry. One of the foundations of conventional bee management is the use of low, rectangular, boxy hives with removeable frames. These hive boxes were invented by the Reverand Lorenzo L. Langstroth in 1851 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Langstroth’s hives are large enough to house very substantial hive populations and can be arrayed quite closely together often with only a few yards of inter-hive spacing. The hive and frame design also insures that the bees will construct neat, geometric honeycombs and allows for easy access into the hive by the beekeeper.

Photo by I.Tsukuba, Flickr

Beekeepers are notoriously individualistic in their beekeeping practices.  A beekeeper was quoted in the New Yorker article that if you asked four beekeepers about how to properly do some beekeeping task you would get five different opinions. The article suggests that the collective noun for a group of beekeepers should be an “argument” of beekeepers. There are a few practices, though, that are quite common in “conventional” beekeeping along with the nearly ubiquitous use of Langstroth-type box hives: 1. Removing the male drones from the hive. Since the males do not contribute directly to the production of honey in the hive, they are considered to be worthless. 2. Scraping the hive clean of the sticky material called “propolis” that the bees make from tree resin. The propolis makes the frames difficult (and annoying) to handle. 3. Clipping the wings of the queen bees so that they won’t fly out of the hive and trigger a swarm. 4. Replacing old queens with new, often imported queens to reinvigorate or stimulate the growth of the hive. 5. Removing most of the honey from the hive and “feeding” the hive bees sugar syrups through the winter. The honey is, after all, why many beekeepers managed bee hives. The less expensive syrups, though, are much lower quality food than the honey.

All of the “usual” features of bee management generate an accumulation of stresses on the bees, and all of them represent broad departures from a “natural” honey bee lifestyle. The size of the Langstroth boxes generates a hive population much larger than a “natural” bee nesting group, and the hives being just feet away from each other (as opposed to hundreds or even thousands of meters apart in the case of nests of wild honey bees)  adds intense competitive tension to the hive communities. The removal of the male drones impacts the genetic diversity of the hives (and, possibly, its ability to adapt to stresses and pathogens) and also removes a thermoregulatory participant from the hive (the male drones participate in the cooling wing fanning inside of a heated hive). The propolis is antibacterial and also functions to trap and resist parasites. Its removal eliminates a significant protection for the hive against infections and parasitic invasions. The clipping of the queen’s wings and prevention of swarming prevents the hive from its natural reproduction cycle and also a very effective “house cleaning” step where accumulated parasites can be left behind! And, finally, the removal of the natural food of the bees and its replacement with sugar syrups puts every individual in the hive into an undernourished or malnourished state.

Wild bee hive. Photo by Glasreifeu, Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Seeley is a biologist at Cornell University who studies free-living (i.e. ”wild”) honey bees. In 2002 he returned to a section of upstate New York forest where he had studied the honey bees some 24 years before. He was interested in how hive afflictions such Varroa mite infestations that have arisen since his last wild bee study may have affected the wild bee populations. He found, however, that these free-living honey bees had no Varroa mites at all! He hypothesized that these bees, living a “natural” life style with regular swarming, active male drone selection, and nests well coated in propolis not only regularly cleansed their nests of parasites but also had evolved some genetic resistance to the Varroa mites themselves.

Seeley has organized and published his findings under the heading of “Darwinian Beekeeping.” He contends that much of the colony collapse disorder that is afflicting honey bees (every year between 10 and 40% of the nation’s bee colonies die!) is due to the stressful impacts of conventional beekeeping practices.

Honeybees, Public Domain, Pixabay

Penn State University has a large and very active honey bee research group. An article in the Penn State Research magazine last spring (April 19, 2023)  described an extensive study which compared the productivity and seasonal mortality of hives maintained in three basic management systems: “organic beekeeping” (bees kept on certified organic farms with “as required” interventions for disease or pest control using organically approved chemical treatments or cultural practices), “conventional management” (frequent treatment of hives with synthetic chemicals and nutritional supplements typical of most, large-scale beekeeping systems), and “chemical free management” (no chemicals of any kind used and very little human intervention in the hives. This systems relies on cultural practices and the bees’ innate defenses against disease and parasites).

The results of this study, published in Scientific Reports (April 13, 2023), indicated that organic and conventional management systems had very similar outcomes. Organic and conventional beekeeping had higher winter survival rates than chemical free management (180% higher), and organic and conventional systems had over double the honey production compared to chemical free management.

It is significant to note that all three of the types of beekeeping management in the Penn State study employed Langstroth-type hives.  It would have been interesting to compare a “Darwinian Beekeeping” system to these inherently more conventional management systems.