Yes, we have many good apiaries here. I'm lucky to live in an area with a great focus on local beekeepers and supporters. They're good people selling amazing local honey that are keeping healthy bee colonies and trying to do their best, as we are finding thousands dead in parking lots. You just said the ones you know don't use commercial practices but you're stuck on commercial beekeeping and those who do. You acknowledge the existence of good beekeeping, yet shun it by implying that general practice means we should stamp the entire practice of beekeeping with a bad seal. Taking extra honey from a hive that has overproduced, as they all do, wild or in a kept hive, is not hurting a bee colony. To a small-time beekeeper that still relies on this as a source of income, especially here and now where I am where we're finding so many dead bees of various types, and other pollinators, it is just not logical to risk your hive's health or lives. I will continue to support them and encourage others to do so. Their bees are helping pollinate the food and plants those farmers sell as well. They get a safe place to live and aren't dying off en masse. Not shocking. They're well-taken care of. If you think every single apiary is just slinging syrup at their bees, you aren't talking to enough apiaries or reading enough material. Syrups are not the only supplemental feed, and supplemental feeds are not necessarily used just because they can be used. They're used in bad crop seasons, a harsh or sudden frost, and if a hive is found to have an illness to treat them back to health. Bees can go through their honey over the winter even if you have not harvested from them. It doesn't matter if they are wild or if they're cared for by a keeper; it happens and it can be dealt with safely.

Again, "general practice" of commercial industry is not a golden ticket to go around shunning every producing apiary or to omit important information about healthy beekeeping to get others to see your ways. There's nothing wrong with being vegan, but there's a reason people get defensive when you're going around comparing every local producer of something you're against consuming or using to their commercial counterpart as if that "general practice" is the only practice.