I've read many things online- this is from the PETA website :
(I only copied part of it coz otherwise it'd be too long)
"Manipulating Nature
Profiting from honey requires the manipulation and exploitation of the insects’ desire to live and protect their hive. Like other factory-farmed animals, honeybees are victims of unnatural living conditions, genetic manipulation, and stressful transportation.
The familiar white box that serves as a beehive has been around since the mid-1850s and was created so that beekeepers could move the hives from place to place. The New York Times reported that bees have been “moved from shapes that accommodated their own geometry to flat-topped tenements, sentenced to life in file cabinets.”(19)
Since “swarming” (the division of the hive upon the birth of a new queen) can cause a decline in honey production, beekeepers do what they can to prevent it, including clipping the wings of a new queen, killing and replacing an older queen after just one or two years, and confining a queen who is trying to begin a swarm.(20,21) Queens are artificially inseminated using drones, who are killed in the process.(22) Commercial beekeepers also “trick” queens into laying more eggs by adding wax cells to the hive that are larger than those that worker bees would normally build.(23)
Since late 2006, farmed honeybee populations have succumbed yearly to a disease called “colony collapse disorder.” Although scientists have yet to find a cause, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says researchers continue to focus on key possibilities that include “bee management stress,” “pesticide poisoning,” and “inadequate forage/poor nutrition.”(24)
What You Can Do
Avoid honey, beeswax, propolis, royal jelly, and other products that come from bees. Vegan lip balms and candles are readily available. Visit CaringConsumer.com for a list of companies that don’t use animal products. Agave nectar, rice syrup, molasses, sorghum, barley malt, maple syrup, and dried fruit or fruit concentrates can be used to replace honey in recipes. Call 1-888-VEG-FOOD or visit GoVeg.com to order a free vegetarian/vegan starter kit that contains information about compassionate eating choices."
One more source- but it's waaaaaay too long so have copied some
"This essay explains why vegans do not eat honey.
By Definition
The simplest reason why honey isn't vegan is by definition. The term vegan was coined by Donald Watson in 1944 and was defined as follows:
Veganism is a way of living which excludes all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, the animal kingdom, and includes a reverence for life. It applies to the practice of living on the products of the plant kingdom to the exclusion of flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, animal milk and its derivatives, and encourages the use of alternatives for all commodities derived wholly or in part from animals (Stepaniak).
People who follow a vegan diet for health or environmental reasons, please take note.
We don't, however, need to go back to 1944 to define honey as not vegan. Any definition of veganism would talk about not exploiting animals, and honeybees (Apis mellifera) are, without a doubt, animals. Honeybees are in the phylum Arthropoda--the same as lobsters and crabs. So in addition to crustaceans, if honeybees don't merit respect, that would also leave earthworms vulnerable to dissection in biology classes. Similarly, iscallops, snails, and oysters would be fair game--they are not as "high up" on the evolutionary scale as bees. James and Carol Gould (respectively, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton and a full-time science writer) point out that "Honey bees are at the top of their part of the evolutionary tree, whereas humans are the most highly evolves species on our branch. To look at honeybees, then, is to see one of the two most elegant solutions to the challenges of life on our planet. More interesting, perhaps, than the many differences are the countless eerie parallels--convergent evolutionary answers to similar problems" (Gould, x). Of course, all this talk of higher and lower is fiction. Even Darwin reminded himself to "Never use the words higher and lower" (Dunayer, 13).
Who are Honeybees?
Before we go any further, please take a moment to meet the honeybees.
Are Bees Smart?
So why do people think they can exploit bees without qualms? Is it because they are not intelligent? There is evidence that says they are. People have been studying bee behavior for hundreds of years, and with good reason. But of course, it's just all pheromones and instinct, right? They act in ways that suggest intelligence, but there's a simple biochemical explanation. (And this is different from humans in what way?) Placing all of this aside, what about a possible bee imagination? The most compelling indication of bee smarts follows. (Yes, it's controversial, but I for one like to err on the side of caution.) Two groups of bees (foragers) from the same hive were trained to two food sources, one on the shore and one in the middle of a lake. When the food quality was increased at both feeders, both groups of bees danced in the hive to tell the rest of the bees where to get the good food. The bees watching the shore feeder dance went out and ate at the shore feeder. Perhaps the bees watching the lake feeder dance, thought, "Flowers in the middle of a lake? This gal must be nuts," and very few bees went to the lake feeder. So at this point you're thinking those bees just didn't want to fly out over a smelly lake? Well, the thoughtful researchers decided to try the experiment again and moved the lake feeder close to the opposite shore (although still surrounded by plenty of water). That time, the bees seemed to have thought the food source to be in a more plausible spot and, following the dance, lots of bees went to both feeders (Gould, 222).
What About Pain?
But it really doesn't matter anyway, does it? Vegans typically don't judge species based on their intelligence. If it were ok to eat someone because he's dumb, a lot of humans would be in trouble. It must be because bees can't feel pain. But why wouldn't bees feel pain? They are animals with a large nervous system (Snodgrass, 254) capable of transmitting pain signals. And unlike in the case of plants, pain as we know it would be a useful evolutionary feature since bees are capable of moving to avoid it. Which, as far as I'm concerned, is all that matters. Pain must be unpleasant or else it wouldn't work. If common sense isn't good enough, we can always resort to scientific studies that indicate that bees feel pain.
Not being a beekeeper myself, it is hard to say why life would be more painful for kept bees vs. wild bees. The kept bees would seem to have more contact with humans and more bees would die from stinging them. But, again, unless you are a "vegan" who lives on a farm and raises animals with lots of love so you can drink their milk and eat their eggs (??) pain really isn't the issue either.
The Enslavement of Bees
The simple fact is that the bees are enslaved. What? Bees slaves? Yes, bees as slaves. Or it's dominionism, exploitation of nature, human superiority, whatever you like to call it. It's the idea that humans are justified in using all other life forms instrumentally, for our own benefit. As Alice Walker said, "The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men." (I would also add that plants and the earth were not made for humans either.) What follows is a look at specifically how honeybees are exploited by humans. Note that this follows precisely the same pattern of animal exploitation that vegans seek to end for other species.
It is important to realize who is keeping these bees. You may have an image in your mind of a man (indeed, 5% of US beekeepers are women (Hoff & Schertz Willett, 10)) with a few hives out in his backyard. While that is in fact the proper image of most beekeepers, most honey comes from full-time factory bee farmers; check out some illustrative charts."
www.vegetus.org that was from if anyone wants to read the rest.
But like everything each to their own and so on... We all draw lines somewhere .. I just can't find a way of honey being ok . Love to all xoxoxo
