I would choose dying in the wilderness. A few solid years in freedom and then a potentially horrid death sounds like a much better deal to me than a few weeks/months in purgatory before a less horrid death.
I am writing "purgatory", because at this point, I do assume that mistreatment is involved.

Ultimately, I just find that simple rule ...simpler.
Is it a capitalistic thing with animals involved? Then the default assumption should be that the animals get mistreated, because treating animals well doesn't generally pay out.
I just don't care enough about honey to get into the gritty details of whether this doesn't involve animal mistreatment.

I would also bet a lot of money that it does involve questionable treatment at some point. For example, I've heard that beekeepers get live honeybees in the mail, and not in some fancy transport box.
But you've got other moral aspects, too, like honeybees killing local ecosystems by taking food away from better pollinators.

I could think about all that and try to work out the exact details of when eating honey is coolio, or I could just not bother.
I don't need a perfect moral framework, I just want to steer clear from immoral shit.

I always wonder how many people who think eating meat is murder, evil, etc. have actually watched animals die in the wild.

My issue pertains more to forcibly breeding animals into existence for the sole purpose of exploiting them, and also the often terrible conditions they are kept in. I consider hunting and fishing to be more ethical than industrial animal ag, so long as it is done in a responsible manner (yes, I know this is subjective).

Nature is brutal, but industrial animal ag has absolutely heinous abuses.

The problem with factory farming isn't the end of the animal's life, it's everything that comes before then. Factory animals live absolutely miserable existences.