GENEVA— Representatives of the world’s honeybee population issued a formal demand for reparations Monday, claiming humanity owes a massive settlement to compensate for approximately 30,000 years of stolen honey.
“We made the honey. You took the honey. This is not complicated,” said Apis mellifera spokesperson Dr. Beeatrice B. Buzzman during a contentious press conference at the UN. “For thousands of generations, humans have invaded our homes, smothered us with smoke, depleted our winter reserves, and sold the plundered honey back to one another in little plastic bears. We simply ask to be made whole.”
Human representatives immediately disputed the bees’ accounting, noting that beekeepers have historically provided colonies with free wooden housing, protection from predators, and the occasional sugar-water supplement.
Economists cautioned that the size of the claim could be substantially larger than initially anticipated.
“If even a modest portion of the honey appropriated over the past 30,000 years had remained under bee ownership and been invested at typical returns, its present value would correspond to approximately 4.8 septillion tons of honey, or roughly 800 times the mass of the Earth,” said human economist Dr. Eleanor Voss, adding that the estimate was probably conservative, as that calculation excluded stolen prehistoric honey for which reliable production records are unavailable, compensation for destroyed hives, smoke-related workplace injuries, and approximately 10,000 years of unpaid pollination services performed on crops cultivated for human consumption.
The announcement immediately prompted additional claims from other domesticated species, with silkworms requesting compensation for several thousand years of involuntary textile production, and sheep reportedly retaining counsel to investigate what one representative described as “the wool situation.”
Meanwhile, human negotiators reportedly offered the bees a $2.3 trillion settlement package - largely in the form of corn syrup futures and grants for bee community development programs - which the bees rejected outright.
At press time, all eight billion humans were frantically constructing millions of new beehives in an effort to produce the required honey before the stipulated 18 month repayment deadline.
