ooh yeah that does sound like dumb fake concern. the relationship we have with bees is ideally pretty mutually beneficial and outside of the framework of an idea like theft. Christianity does seem like a good analoge for it. like there's people who obviously don't get the ethics of it beyond a aesthetic performance.

somebody else in the comments just told me that in industrial honey farms will do things like clip the wings of queens to prevent them from moving colonies away so I can understand the concern there though. or that domestic bee colonies disrupt local wild ones which is also valid.

I'm of the same mindset as you then. something I realized a while back is there are humane ways of doing agriculture but the demands of capitalism have forced us to take the exploitation of animals and workers to insane body horror places. I don't think I can live animal product free but I absolutely respect people who do and I'm definitely invested in changing our economy into one that doesn't require infinite growth at the cost of all this suffering.