Inside The Baffling Subreddit Where People Talk About Having Sex With Bees

As a teenager, whenever Marvin – now a 27-year-old software engineer from Phoenix, Arizona – watched videos of bees on the National Geographic channel, he felt a peculiar excitement that left him aroused though confused. 

It came as a tingling sensation running down his spine and often, if not always, resulting in an experience similar to an orgasm. 

VICE agreed to identify Marvin and other people that we’ve spoken to for this piece by pseudonyms because they all felt uncomfortable discussing their bee fetish in public. 

As the unnamed feeling evolved, Marvin tried looking up “bee fantasy” or “insect fetish” online to find others who might’ve had similar experiences. For seven years, the search didn’t turn up anything.

Then, around 2019, he got a hit. 

In an NSFW thread on Reddit, scores of people described an uncontrollable urge to fornicate with bees – a “wild lust” to “submit to a dominant bee,” a euphoric “beegasm,” feeling turned on “after watching the queen bee ravish multiple partners.” Many of them revealed that they no longer watched regular porn, having swapped it for videos of bees doing the deed, or pollinating around town.

Marvin scrolled through post after post on the thread.

“I realised I wanted to have sex with bees when I was 17. But it wasn't until recently that I found my community where it is safe to talk about my ardour for lewd AR bug content,” he told VICE on Reddit.

Welcome to r/honeyfuckers, a subreddit with more than 34,000 members who share their erotic buzzy fantasies through anime and other art forms. 

The concept is simple, even if the allure is not immediately self-evident: “Honeyfuckers,” which is what the subreddit members are called, upload sexualised images of bees, which could be any gender, and talk about everything from banging worker bees in swimsuits to thicc bee booties. 

Linz, 35, the subreddit moderator, started the group in 2018. The inspiration to create a community space where people can share their stories about bee sex came from the Honeybee Inn, a fictional brothel in the video game series Final Fantasy VII, where girls roam around in bee costumes for the player to interact with. 

“Walking into the Honeybee Inn, in the original game, hit an 11-year old me in a way I couldn't put into words, but smouldered in the recesses of my mind,” Linz told VICE. 

Out here, people with an innate attraction, or a desire to have sex with these pollinating insects mingle and create art to share with the community, who, in turn, open conversations and discuss buzzing topics in their niche – all brought together with a shared lust for bees.

“When my friend and I began creating memes and finding images of bee-smut for the subreddit, we quickly learned that there are many categories of ‘honeyfuckers’ out there,” said Linz. “Some are attracted to anthropomorphic bees, or people dressed up as bees. Some are attracted to the idea of becoming bee-sized and enjoying their fantasy that way. Some are more drawn to the archetypal 'furry' style of bees, while others just like cute anime bees. But some people literally want to fuck actual bees, shove them up their butts, pussies or cocks.”

The desire to have sex with bees is known as melissophilia, which is a broad definition of a fetish (or fetishes) of people who experience arousal from contact with bees or bee stings. Facilitated by platforms such as Reddit, Discord, and other dedicated social networks and forums for bee fanatics, the connection between melissophiles and bees is one of psychological, emotional and sexual satisfaction. 

This particular preference for bees can vary from person to person. Some people are simply turned on by looking at a photograph or drawing of a bee. Others may prefer getting stung by a bee to make their genitals hypersensitive and extend the duration of orgasm. While the former doesn’t harm the bees, and the sexual pleasure is derived from masturbation, catching the bees for their sting always kills the insects. This sexual act is categorised under “formicophilia,” the sexual interest in being nibbled at or crawled on by insects. While these fetishes are closely related, members of r/honeyfuckers don’t identify with formicophilia as they don’t believe in harming the bees for their pleasure.

Along with fetish culture in general, melissophilia has had wider exposure in recent years through popular culture and erotic media. In 2019, Pornhub launched “Beesexual," a philanthropic campaign aimed at raising awareness about the declining bee population. 

With titles like "Mature Natural Gets Plowed By Worker Bee” and “How To Make A Flower Cum in Three Seconds,” the videos are SFW but the background sound is not exactly what you would get from a buzzing garden. Instead, popular voices from the porn industry lend their sexy voices and moans to these bees. Pornhub says that for every view, it donates to bee-saving charities.

Jacob, a 26-year-old graphic designer from Long Beach, California, found the group after battling years of bullying for drawing bee comics in school. “This community inspired me to own my fantasies and art without judgement,” they told VICE. 

“Today, I am a character artist for a gaming conglomerate and proud to represent the community through my artwork wherever possible. I am also a member of a sub-group, where we raise money for bee shelters. Some of us started even before Pornhub.” 

In July 2021 alone, a subgroup of 13 members on r/honeyfuckers raised $4,000 for an environmental education nonprofit. 

In the last two decades, the population of these winged wonders have declined by 87 percent due to habitat destruction, pesticides, gentrification of sustainable land patches, and the many factors contributed by global warming. Nature’s most important pollinators, bees are not only vital to the ecosystem but are also responsible for helping produce a third of the food we eat. 

It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of pollinators in our ecosystem. In case you missed it in high school biology: when a male flower loves a female flower, it invites a pollinator to round out its threesome. The bee transfers pollen from the male flower to the lady bits of female flowers. A few days later, a baby watermelon or apple emerges. While bees are not the only pollinators we have (bats, birds, butterflies, and some flies can do this work, too), they’re by far the best creatures for the job. 

This subreddit is one way of thanking them for their hard work.

Members of the subreddit also actively look out for bee-shaming, and participate in private workshops for those who identify with melissophilia. Many, understandably, are still figuring out the nature of their desire. 

Jacob learned about the extent to which kinkphobia is ingrained in our society, and the toxicity of vanilla sex culture, in the years he’s been a member of the subreddit.

Jacob said they “aim to make it an inviting, judgement-free space for others,” and have received support from thousands of members who expressed solidarity and wished that it existed when they were growing up. 

“We have taken control of the narrative for the portrayal of uncommon fetishes, much like mainstream movies are slowly pushing the glass ceiling to accommodate more narratives of kinks,” said Jacob. “And if all goes well, we will approach a time when we, like the BDSM community before them, will normalise the idea that it is okay to think about having bee sex.”

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