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Honey
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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About honey: we do need bees. But taking away their honey which they work really hard for to sustain their colony during the winter and replacing it with sugar water is really bad for them and makes their colony weak. They can get viruses, bacteria and fungi much faster, which they can spread to other colonies or when splitting up when their queen dies.
Next to that, bees we use for honey are a very aggressive territorial species. They claim their territory and all the other bee and whasp species are killed and pushed out. There are many bee and whasp species who do not live in colonies but are very important for the biodiversity. Replacing them with our bees, which will die and get sick faster because we take away their nuteician rich honey, is a bad idea.
We do need our bees, but in reduces quantities to keep the balance. But we shouldn't take their food.
I'd say the issue is that if honey isn't vegan because you're causing harm to bees, isn't most of modern vegetable agriculture at least equally harmful to bees & other insects due to all the pesticides being used?
Or is it just if we directly involve bees, it's bad, but if we inflict greater harm in a less direct way, it's acceptable?
Every aspect of our globalised and industrialised world is causing harm. Veganism is about reducing the harm we're responsible for as far as possible and reasonable. Renouncing honey is easy. So it's possible and reasonable. No vegan thinks they're responsible for zero suffering or even zero dead animals, we're simply trying to reduce the number as best as we can without starving ourselves.
But if honey is cultivated in a way that's better for the bees than other sources of sugar, wouldn't using honey be more logical for vegans?
In a perfect world I think this could be true. Small scale backyard beekeeping with native species, where I only take the surplus the bees themselves don't use, where queens are left alone and drones are allowed to reproduce in their own pace. The problem is: That's not how it's done on the industrial scale at all. So even if you had such a bee utopia in your backyard and could replace all your sugary needs with that, as long as the well being of bees is of interest to you you'd probably still refrain from buying products that have honey in them. In a capitalist society companies will always use the cheaper stuff, and that comes almost exclusively with massive animal exploitation.
That argument does hold water but it would never provide enough honey for the market. It would necessarily require a vast reduction in the demand for honey to allow sustainably sourced honey to meet that demand.
I'm a going with far more harmful.
Yeah. The modern method of acres and acres of one species being farmed, with or without pesticides and other performance enhancing drugs is terrible for the environment.
For many animals, you might as well build an asphalt parking lot for each acre of corn or soy you plant. Same goes for Western grass lawns.
The critters that can't adapt starve or move away.
So you are saying that instead of eating vegetables vegans should just eat honey?
Vegans should stop eating vegetables and only eat honey then? Is that it?
Not just insects. Vermin control is critical and often not very ethical. Here in Australia, rabbits and kangaroos can be a big issue for farmers too and are often killed to protect crops when they become too numerous. Ducks can be a big issue for rice farmers here and permits are issued to shoot ducks on crops.
I mean bees are producing way more than they are using. We just shouldn't take it all.
It's a buffer for when the climate is different then normal so they will need more food...
That's not true, bees really do produce more than one colony needs. The thing is that when they have no more room to store honey some bees will take a large portion of it and leave to start a new colony which is bad for you as a beekeeper and other insect species. The way I see it you definitely should take the honey. Just leave some for the winter.
Bees weren't made by humans. They can survive on their own. They work until they die out of exhaustion due to the hard work, they work because of need, not of joy. Whenever they split up when there is enough honey, they spread around. That's how bees work. By limiting them to one colony by partially starving them, we endanger the species. It's already going bad for bees, due to urbanization, perticides, climate change but also colony starvation for honey production.
No one is talking about starving the bees. Someone already pointed out that bees are territorial and not great for the local insect population. You can let bees spread but there are better ways to do it. Bees do work because they think they need to, the thing is you can help them and have leftover honey that they don't need to use. You don't even need to limit the to one colony.
But to be fair our bees are nowhere near any urban areas nor pesticides so it might be different elsewhere.
So far, trying to control nature isn't going that well. The more we do, the more we fuck it up. Maybe we should give nature some time to recover from our destruction without intervention.
Generally you're not wrong but when it comes to European honey bees (which are the most common for honey production) they are presumed extinct in the wild. They need to be treated multiple times throughout the year (and it's increasing due to climate change). Also these bees have been imported to Americas where they are not native so controlling them is very important there.