The Captivity of Honeybees: Rethinking Our Relationship

In Cape Town, keeping honeybees requires a permit — a law that took years to establish, yet one that is poorly communicated and often ignored. Honeybees are wild animals, but this truth has been so deeply forgotten that most people do not realise their captivity is regulated at all.

Captivity, no matter the intention, removes an animal from its natural way of living and being in the world. To restrict a wild being’s behaviour — to domesticate them — is, at its core, unethical. And yet, honeybees have been held captive by humans for hundreds of years without question. It has become the “norm” to view them entirely through an agricultural lens, as if their existence exists only to serve human need.

Honeybees have been taken to almost every corner of the earth, moved around like tools, their bodies used to pollinate poisoned agricultural landscapes, their food taken from them, their colonies manipulated for maximum extraction. At every level, they are exploited — and yet this exploitation has become so normalised that few even see it.

There is a reason why permits are required to keep other forms of wildlife: because captivity harms the animal’s well-being and disrupts their natural way of being. Why, then, are honeybees excluded from this understanding? Why is their autonomy invisible? Humans have claimed supremacy over honeybees for centuries, believing that providing a hive makes us their caretakers — but the hive is not a gift. It is not a home offered freely. It is a structure designed for human ease and extraction.

I struggle to understand how so much harm has been caused to honeybees, for so long, with so little reflection or care. When I challenge this, the response is often defensive: “But we love honey.” Or, “Bees are happy in their hives.” Yet this reveals the depth of our human-centred thinking — a belief that our desires justify their suffering. This is human supremacy rising like a cloud of toxic heat, shielding us from seeing the reality of what we are doing.

But things are changing. A shift is happening. Around the world, more and more people are beginning to question the old narratives — the idea that humans stand above and apart from all other beings. We are beginning to understand that we are part of a larger web of connection and cooperation. And in this new way of seeing, the honeybees are calling us to humility, to listen, and to remember: they are not ours to own.

To keep honeybees captive and call it care is to mistake control for kindness. Every time we take their food, move their homes, and bend their lives to serve us, we tell ourselves a story of human supremacy. But the bees tell another story — one of interconnection, reciprocity, and freedom. Which story we choose will define not only their future, but ours.