AITAH for how I handle my bees' winter food situation?

I (37M) have been keeping bees for about six years now and honestly it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done. I know that sounds dramatic but I genuinely love these little guys more than most people in my life. I have four hives in my backyard and I spend probably 15-20 hours a week just tending to them, checking on them, making sure they're healthy and happy.

For context, I got into beekeeping after a really rough patch in my life. Divorce, lost my job, the whole thing. My therapist suggested I find something that would "ground me" and I stumbled into a local beekeeping class. From the first time I cracked open a hive and saw thousands of bees working together in perfect harmony I was hooked. Like these tiny creatures just know exactly what to do. They each have their role and they just do it. It honestly changed how I look at the world.

I am genuinely obsessed with watching them work. I'll sit by the hives for hours on weekends just watching the foragers come and go. In the spring when the clover starts blooming you can see them come back with their little pollen baskets completely loaded up, just these bright yellow saddlebags on their legs. And inside the hive they're building the most perfect honeycomb you've ever seen, every cell exactly the same size, filled with this gorgeous golden honey that they've made from nectar they collected from thousands of flowers. I'm not ashamed to say I've cried watching them do their thing. It's legitimately beautiful.

I do everything for these bees. I treat for mites twice a year. I make sure they have enough ventilation in summer. I built windbreaks for the hives in winter with my own hands. When one of my colonies had a failing queen last year I drove three hours round trip to pick up a new mated queen from a breeder because I didn't want them to go queenless. I worry about them constantly. My girlfriend (33F) jokes that I talk about my bees the way other people talk about their kids and honestly she's not wrong.

So here's where the issue comes in. My girlfriend has started getting really weird about how I handle the end of season. Every fall I do a full harvest. I take all the honey and all the capped honeycomb from every hive. I'm talking frames and frames of the stuff, usually around 60-80 pounds per hive. I sell some at the farmer's market and keep the rest for personal use. Then I feed the bees sugar syrup through the winter so they don't starve. It's just a 2:1 sugar water mixture, nothing fancy. It keeps them alive and it's way more cost effective for me than leaving them their own honey.

My girlfriend watched me do the harvest this past October and got really quiet afterward. She finally said she thinks it's messed up that I take ALL of their honey after spending the whole summer talking about how amazing they are and how hard they work and then I just "swap it out for sugar water like they won't notice." I told her it's standard practice and beekeepers have been doing this for literally centuries. She said she doesn't care what's standard and that it's "the same energy as those people who say they love their dog and then leave it chained in the yard." That comparison honestly pissed me off because it's not even close to the same thing.

My buddy who also keeps bees said my girlfriend is being ridiculous and that the bees don't care, sugar syrup has the same caloric value as honey. But my girlfriend keeps bringing it up and now her sister is on her side too saying I have "a weird relationship with animals where I only value them for what they give me." Which is insane because I literally spend hundreds of dollars a year on these bees and ask for nothing in return. Well, except the honey. And the honeycomb. And the beeswax. But like that's the whole point of beekeeping?

She also brought up that I got really emotional telling her about how the bees fan the nectar with their wings to evaporate the water content and turn it into honey and how it takes something like 12 bees their entire lifetime to produce one teaspoon. And then I just take it all. When she puts it that way I can see how it sounds bad but I feel like she's anthropomorphizing them. They're insects. They don't have feelings about the honey. They just make more.

She's been cold with me for weeks and honestly it's starting to affect our relationship. She told her mom about it and now her mom thinks I'm "not a compassionate person" which is ridiculous because I AM compassionate, that's literally why I keep bees, because I care about them. AITAH?