#if we could just redirect all vegan's energy towards taking down CAFOs and making it so everyone could afford plenty good healthy food

[turtlesandfrogs]

The amount of misinformation in this reblog chain is astounding.

0. There are legitimate reasons why people might not want to consume honey. However, the vast majority of a commercial apiary's income comes from pollination services (which everyone who eats from the grocery store should be consuming because all of you eat fruit, riiiiight?), and a lot of "honey" in stores has been found to not actually be honey (or is very adulterated) so I personally find it a moot issue.

Quinoa does not come from child slave labor, and the whole article that kicked off everyone saying quinoa was bad for the farmers was retracted, because it was wrong. The farmers were eating less quinoa- because they could afford a greater diversity of food. The quinoa boom was good for the poorest segments of the exporting countries. Also, the boom is long over, and vegans have never been the primary consumers of quinoa, because there just aren't that many. Also, the vast majority of agave goes to making tequila. And for the syrup, again the number of people who are eating it are doing it because of misinformation about it's fructose content and they think it's healthier than honey and/or hfcs, not because they're vegan. I don't drink tequila (or use agave syrup), but there are people working on this issue and you can find out more by looking up bat safe tequila.

Honey is not inherently murder, though there are practices in commercial apiaries that aren't the best for honeybees or native bees. They do move hives across great distances for pollination services, and they think this is why diseases have been able to spread so easily. Requeening is a thing that is done though as a common practice, and when seeing a colony as a super organism I can see why that give some people pause.

Metaphorically I guess it could be described as puking their guts up, but it's what they do. If you're going to go against commercial apiaries, there's several things you could point out (transmission of diseases, encouraging the continued monocropping, competing with native bees, etc, etc), but this isn't a great one to go with.

Honey maker? Come on. Please read up on beekeeping from actual bee keeping sources so that you can make better arguments. This is an embarrassment & falsehood, and only serves to push people further away from veganism.

Gemstone-gynoid is correct.

The queen is not actually outside, except on the flight to get fertilized and start a new hive, or when swarming. The queen stays in the hive the vast majority of her life. And they don't always leave, sometimes they just die due to mismanagement, bad weather, disease, etc. Also swarming is one of their methods of reproducing, and beekeepers 100% go to efforts to prevent swarming from happening.

I wouldn't say they're consenting in any meaningful way, since to harvest honey you have to smoke the bees to make them placid. It's not like they let you just take it. Their objection is instinctual and quite obvious. Being gentle and careful helps, a lot, but do you really think that happens in a capitalistic, for-profit setting?

Bees manufacture honey from NECTAR, not pollen, though pollen is also an important part of their diet.

Also, people usually harvest honey in the fall, and then feed the bees with sugar through the winter until they're able to start making honey again (at least on commercial farms.). Even when we're not taking it, they don't always make "more of it than they'd ever need". Bees have good years and bees have bad years, and sometimes even when people haven't harvested any, the bees run out of food before flowers start blooming again. Harvesting the excess honey prevents them from swarming and starting a new hive, having extra honey sticking around does not harm bees (it's a whole fascinating process, very much worth looking into).

They do make an excess in the flowering season, but that evolved as a way to make it through the winter. As said above, some times winters are colder or longer than usual, and sometimes bee hives have to be fed to make it. Also, depending on which part of the world you are in, honey bees are a non-native species that is directly competing with native species and sometimes spreading diseases to them. There are papers on this from plenty of non-vegan sources. Here's one source: https://www.xerces.org/blog/want-to-save-bees-focus-on-habitat-not-honey-bees

vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it