Essentially all modern honey farming is what you're calling "ethical". It's too expensive to replace the colony each year now that we have an alternative, and a

Essentially all modern honey farming is what you're calling "ethical". It's too expensive to replace the colony each year now that we have an alternative, and a winter - even a relatively mild winter in most parts of the world - will kill the bees if you've stolen all their food. Unlike the maple tree, we do know how to substitute the valuable honey for nutritionally similar but cheaper alternatives - you can buy suitable food commercially because this is a whole industry, nevertheless, vegans object to our intervention, the bees didn't make nutritionally equivalent bee food, they made honey. Even farmers who choose to calibrate and remove only some honey, judging what will be enough for their colony to survive, are considered not to meet vegan requirements for the same reason. To the extent there's a shared definition it really is as simple as originally explained, animal: not OK, non-animal: fine. One of my professors (who is now vegan) had an ethical rule prohibiting eating things which, like him, had backbones. Same idea, it's more similar to me, therefore don't eat it. All such lines in the sand are somewhat arbitrary.