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I was wondering what yall think of honey.

Basically, despite the fact that I'm slowly getting closer to veganism, I can't see myself not eating honey. Not because it's vital to my diet or I can't give it up or whatever, but because I see no reason to.

I hate bees. Like, they terrify me and I reallyreallyreally hate them. I will cross the street to avoid a bee. When one gets close to me I jump away. Last summer one was walking on me and someone told me not to move and I was standing there whimpering and practically crying because I was so terrified. It's one of my few fears, and its a major fear. So basically even if bees were abused, I could care less.

So I will continue eating honey.

But I wondered whether yall eat it or not, and I guess what yall think of my logic on that, etc.

I rarely eat honey, anyway, and I'm not vegan. The only thing I like with honey is apple slices, and I don't often have honey in the house.

I don't know anything about how honey is even gathered, so I'm not making a judgement call on whether or not it's ok.

Badgerkin, I know you got this from a website, so please don't take any personal offense when I say that the site doesn't know what they're talking about. sweatdrop


My parents were hobbyist beekeepers as I was growing up, and spending time watching them and meeting a number of professional beekeepers (as well as doing things like reading Usenet beekeeping groups and being familiar with beekeeping catalogues) gave me a lot of knowledge about the trade.



First off, most beekeepers do not do this. It's very difficult to find the queen bee in the hive, and then separating her from her ever-present attendants is also difficult (if she's away from them too long she dies, because she can't feed herself).

Secondly, drones die after mating, and its somewhat painful (my understanding is that its similar to the way bees die after stinging, which involves their intestines falling out). So I sort of question how inhumane it really is to painlessly decapitate them rather than letting them mate in the "natural" way and dying as a result, anyway. sweatdrop No-win situation, I suppose.




Okay, I can't speak about Israel. I don't know about their practices.

However, again, most beekeepers do not kill their queen and then put in a new one. Sometimes they do it when her egg production drops, yes, but in those situations the workers eventually create a new queen and kill the old one themselves. In other words, when a beekeeper kills a queen and introduces a new one, he or she is doing exactly what the hive would do itself in a little while.




That's true that bees are crushed and killed. I don't see how it could be avoided, since bees crawl over and onto everything around the hive. Beekeepers do their best to avoid hurting the bees, and I've seen many hives opened, fully examined, and closed back up without a single bee being hurt. Sometimes, though, the beekeeper just doesn't see that one worker who crawls up under the super.




They really should go into detail about why this works.

To the best of my knowledge the smoke doesn't harm the bees - what it does do is initiate their instinct to eat. They move lower down into the hive to eat the honey, and then they're too full to effectively sting the beekeeper.



The website makes it sound as if the bees mind.

In nature, bees build their nests in old tree trunks, in the ground, and any other hollow spot they can find. The cartoon image of an oval beehive hanging from a tree isn't real. Beeshives are built around all sorts of odd protrusions and into all sorts of strangely shaped openings. So I don't see why the website is implying that a hive's space is "violated" by placing something in the hive or near the hive opening.

Moreover, bees are designed to brush up against things - they have pollen collectors on their legs for precisely that purpose.




This is true. Its the only way to get them out.

I have never seen this harm a bee, however; they're resilient creatures. I've even seen someone detach a swarm by cutting the branch it was hanging from and making it fall about 15 feet into a waiting hive body. Much to my surprise, when I looked shortly thereafter once the bees had calmed down, there were no dead bees.



Okay, there's a lot of nonsense in here that needs to be sorted out.

First off, a queen only takes one flight in her life - a mating flight. After that flight she rests, then finds a spot for a new hive and sets up shop. The workers that leave the original hive to go with her constitute the swarm.

The queen that leaves is, obviously, a new queen. There would be no sense in a beekeeper clipping the wings of a new queen in order to prevent her from swarming (or, as implied by the website, to cage her in) unless they were breeding a new queen and wanted to artificially inseminate her and then insert her into a new hive. In other words, if they're in the business of selling queens and didn't want her to leave her new hive in order to mate and establish a new one.

However, if they're going to artificially inseminate queen bees, then clipping their wings is no big deal at all - bees have no nerves in their wings, and after the mating flight the queen's wings become unusable, anyway. In other words, they're putting her in the same position she'd be in as if she'd had a mating flight and founded a new hive.

As for swarming itself...yes, it can be a bad thing. Bees swarm when they become overpopulated and their old queen is still laying sufficiently (so the workers don't want to kill her off quite yet and replace her); however, that is the only precondition to their swarming. They don't swarm based on season or food availability, so sometimes they swarm at a stupid time; since they're essentially taking one overpopulated hive and splitting it in half, sometimes you end up with two underpopulated hives right before winter starts. Moreover, the second hive has no built-up storage of honey for food.

If the beekeeper lets the colony swarm, both hives will often die.

Instead, beekeepers split hives before the bees swarm; if they find that the workers have made a queen larva, the beekeeper knows it's past time and rushes to prevent the swarm by splitting the hive, putting the comb with the queen larva in the new hive.




This is why most beekeepers are very, very careful about how much honey they remove.

Secondly, I have never met a beekeeper that fed at any time other than the winter months, when there was no pollen or necter available and the hive may or may not have enough stores to last the winter (even if no honey was removed).

Despite what the website seems to imply, bees do not always fare well in most temperate areas without human intervention. Wild bee hives will often die during the winter.



The use of the term "become dependent" is somewhat misleading.

There are no natural ways to combat many of the problems which face bees. Numerous mites and bacteria attack hives, and there are no effective natural remedies for these. In my experience, the beekeepers I know do not use the honey of a hive which has been given antibiotics or treated with any sort of medicine. They treat the hive simply to take care of the bees, knowing that season's crop of honey is shot. I wish the website would give some alternatives of what beekeepers could do to take care of the hive without using medicine, but unfortunately it seems like they don't have any better idea than the beekeepers.




These paragraphs are misleading, since they seems to imply that bees are often sent across national boundaries. In actuality, most countries have strict laws which either regulate or completely restrict the shipment of bees across a border.

The reason these laws were put into place was the problem of African bees. The website mentioned this a bit further down, in the context of beekeepers in South America. African bees are hardier than European bees, so beekeepers, particularly in more northern areas, were buying African bee colonies hoping they would be better able to survive the winter. African bee colonies are much more aggressive than a European hive, however, and so if a beekeeper was unable to control a hive and it swarmed then it would cause much more of a problem in a residential neighborhood than a European hive would.

That's why those reports of "killer bees" came out on the news in the early to mid 90s - those were African bee colonies that had swarmed.

Now, particularly since the advent of problems with the extremely deadly (to bees) varoa mite, much, much more strict laws have been passed regarding import/export and transportation of bees.


Moreover, as for killing a hive with gasoline or liquid soap...no beekeeper I know would ever advocate that. That's a problem with idiots who have no idea how to handle bees. Beekeepers do their best to capture colonies, not kill them.



They may, it's true. Transportation companies do their best to avoid this, though. Beekeepers who purchase colonies want strong hives, and they aren't willing to pay for colonies where a solid percentage of the bees don't survive transit.

And "entombed in their packaged coffins"...? Usually they're shipped in containers with two wooden sides, a wooden top, and a wooden bottom, with the two largest sides being wire mesh just small enough that a bee can't get stuck in it (so, plenty large enough to let air through).




And anyway, I'm not sure what this has to do with buying or not buying honey.




Yes, this is true.

But...the logical thing to do would be to not by the vegetable products that are made this way.



They imply this is true of all beekeepers. In actuality, the group of beekeepers who transport their hives regularly is not very large.


Moreover, I've seen at least one documentary which deals with this issue of transporting hives. The way it works is like this:

The bees are loaded onto a truck during dusk when the bees are all in their hive and back from foraging. They're driven to the new location and unloaded right before dawn, so when the bees emerge they're in their new spot. They're there for a few weeks while the local growth flowers, and then shipped to the next location. In other words, they follow the flowering of the plants (usually northward). This actually turns out to be way more efficient for the bees, because they're constantly in an area where flowering plants are abundant.




I don't really know of any such studies (at least, not that harm the bees in any way) so I can't really comment. The "experiments" I know involve things like painting the hive different colors to protect the hive from too much heat during the summer, placing dividers in the hive to encourage more efficient wax building, using plastic base-boards instead of wax baseboards, and other things that the bees probably don't even notice.




Wouldn't they be doing these things even if bees didn't produce any honey?




Okay, this is now totally off the topic as to whether or not people should buy honey or bee products, but I'm going to respond to some of these anyway.

People with strong allergies of course should not eat honey, because obviously some of the pollen is going to get into the honey! That's also why people with only slight allergies or no allergies are encouraged to eat honey, because the honey also contains products to help prevent allergies towards those specific pollens from getting worse.




The risk is eliminated when dealing with pasteurized honey. Check the label.

Of course, with pasteurized honey, you get less of the benefits of raw honey (re: preventing allergies) so it depends on whether you plan to feed the honey to an infant or not.




And the beekeeper should be notified right away that it isn't a safe place to be raising beehives. Then again, most beekeepers have their hives in rural areas and if they suspect that their bees are going to a dangerous area nearby, they give the bees something much more yummy nearby. Bees don't fly two miles when they have flowering clover, bergamot, or black locust right by the hives.



So closely guarded that you have to read a book to find out how to do it.




And blech. Blech, blech, blech. I have never heard of anyone collecting bee venom, since when a honey bee stings the bee dies.

If I ever found out that any beekeeper was collecting venom, I would certainly boycott that beekeeper's products.

I think it's a choice each person has to make for themselves.

I just wanted to provide a more rounded-out view, since it seemed like the website hadn't done all their research. Places that don't provide the context of their statements or deliberately try to make things sound different than they really are give the entire veg*n movement a bad name; when people make decisions, they should do it based on all the facts.

3nodding

I don't see this as exploiting the bees, since they aren't trapped and made to do things they wouldn't be doing anyway. As long as the beekeeper is taking good care of his bees, I don't see it as hurting them.

I would think that the bees might even have a better life than they might in the wild, since they have a beekeeper providing for them.

Humans use seeing eye dogs to help people. The dogs wouldn't normally do the things they're trained to do. If honey production is exploitation, so is training seeing eye dogs.

As a vegan, I don't eat honey, but I do have Beewax candles which are apparently better for you than burning regular candles and some regular candles have gelatin in them, which I find more disgusting than taking a wax from a bunch of bees..

Gah... the politics of veganism and bees.

honeyz good

Except that they don't taste even remotely the same. confused Syrup is so much sweeter and richer.