There are plenty of other spaces where vegans can respond to “plants feel pain” and “but what about lions” a million times a day, but that gets old pretty quick. The goal is to have a space where vegans can just interact amongst themselves, which necessarily requires some degree of gatekeeping
This isn’t true for the vast majority of commercial honey unfortunately. If you’re buying it from the supermarket, or any producer that operates at even medium scale, they’ll clip the wings of the queen so that the hive is unable to leave even if they want to.