I am now a vegan and I decided that although I would not buy mass produced honey, I would still eat locally sourced honey from the small scale urban bee keepers.
In my area they do a lot of work promoting the care of bees and their importance. They are very involved in local community garden projects where they promote the planting of bee friendly plants. Vegans are, and likely will continue to be, an incredibly small percentage of the population. Some of these comments, judging what a true vegan is, are so silly. Eat what you want. Let other people eat what they want. Leave it at that. Signed, I used to be a vegetarian, but now I eat meat and fish sometimes.
Thank you so much for this. Sad part is, I just bought honey and it will be the last time that I ever do. This is not exactly a valid reason to not eat money. Human consumption of honey is not related to and does not fund experiments done on animals. They are unrelated industries.
If someone decided they would use carrots to abuse animals that does not mean that we should stop eating carrots. It would not be a solution to the problem. I respect your opinion but its people like you who makes all vegans look like fanatics. HOney is a naturally ocurring substance in nature,very nutritious and delicious. Even without farms or colonies made by men tribes have found and ate it for ages. Something not only humans consume,other animals as well.
Just like eggs honey has been consumed forever. Eggs are not healthy but Honey…if honey wasnt for men consumption we would not like its taste and we would not be able to digest it without preparation,just like meat and fish. Honey is a nectar found in the trees just like fruit. If you dont want to consume it for animal testing is up to you but please make clear that from a nutriotion point of view does not harm a vegan diet,quiet the opositte.
Its not an animal product by itself…and please your comparison to human vomit is absurd. Vomit is food in state of decomposition while honey is mainly glucose and antibiotic antioxidant components that makes it one of the few superfoods that last forever. Its so ignorant comparing a mamarian vomit with an insect nourishing nectar. Thats misleading on your part. If you dont want to consume honey good for you but dont lie to people,honey is not humans vomit and any paralelism fails cause guess what?
In your quest to prove honey so wrong for vegans you are embarrassing yourself. Obviously those inmortal qualities benefit who consumes it. Yes theres another nutritious option,maple syrup but its way more expensive.
And like someone else pointed,yes we got way too many cows so no need to support cows farming,but we dont have too many bees and you want us to stop consuming honey…with trees dissapearing as I type this the future of bees will be in farming.
It is called a colonie because of the ways in which the bees interact. That said, I do not think that honey is necessarily unethical. Following your logic, the only way to be a true vegan: Would be to stop using every medical scientific health product that ever used animal testing exploitation. You would be left with absolutely no medicines of any kind including toothpaste, soap and bandaids. Saying we should t eat honey bc of animal testing is dumb.
Not all product or honey is tested on animals. Though I do agree with the fact bees are animals in a sense, we need bees pollination to even help grow our fruits and vegetables so should we not eat those either?
If someone is even trying to make positive changes, it is usually huge for them and should be celebrated. Remember that human kindness is also needed in this world of hate and isolation. In fact, right now in Maryland they are looking to pass a law whereby if a person has even a single hive and a bear goes after it they can kill the bear.
I have been vegan for almost 2 years and have not touched honey because of the fact that it was coming from an animal. But recently my manager whose dad has a Phd in honey bee behaviors and he has done immensely in protecting bees told me that:.
The only one which are living are under humans. The only way to make sure bees live is consume honey as all of them is now part of the apiary and if the industry would fail then this could mean no honey bees for the planet. So my thoughts on eating honey is that bees are going extinct. One of the only thing keeping them alive in a very human world is beekeeping and honey production. Ive been to a few local bee keeps and feel that i can buy selectivity and actually help the bee population instead of refraining from honey and lowering the demand for an industry that is keeping organic feilds growing for an endangered species that will other wise be wiped out by pecticides of the veggies i eat.
If that makes sense. Not taking a position either way — just some clarifications and observations. Bees live about 6 weeks, whether they collect honey or just pollinate flowers. So whether we utilise the honey does not alter the lifespan of a bee. Here in NZ we do not kill off hives before Winter -we keep them alive year round.
I know other countries e. Some bees will be injured or killed when removing supers from hives. Similarly, bees are deliberately kept for pollinating crops that do not produce honey e. Kiwifruit, tomatoes. They die just like honey bees. Is it therefore unethical to eat kiwifruit and tomatoes? Honey is not an animal product like milk for example.
Cows eat grass and produce milk from their internal organs. Bees collect nectar and evaporate the water out of it to make honey. The only part of honey that comes from the bee is the enzymes it puts into the nectar — a tiny fraction of the final substance. Smoke just causes bees to eat some honey in case they need to flee the hive.
I am not aware that it causes harm. A good beekeeper will use very little smoke. The keepers I know in Ontario and British Columbia, Canada do not kill their hives in winter, they insulate them. Nice article but nothing there made me rethink that honey is vegan.
Your argument about animal testing could be true of anything — say potatoes — if they started testing potato starch in this way. Talking about honey and the healing processes, honey is a shown accelerate in wounds and burns. Just food for thought. Maybe one day someone will test to see if stevia leaves aid in wound recuperation. The topical-use honey industry would continue if no-one ate honey, and vice versa. Thanks for writing this.
Thank you so much Pax! I really appreciated your article and comments about this issue. The same author had previously posted a more […]. You'll need to click the confirm button to complete the registration. Without honeybees, our fresh produce aisles would be bare and a vegan or vegetarian diet could be put under extreme stress. If you eat avocados, almonds, kiwi fruit, squash, melons, and a whole host of other fruits and vegetables then your diet is directly reliant on the work of pollinators.
Especially commercially-managed honeybees. In the USA, wild honeybee colonies are almost non-existent. That means that wild bees cannot be relied on to pollinate our crops. The huge swathes of farmland and orchards that supply our supermarkets provide neither habitat nor diversity in food sources for wild pollinators to flourish.
Pollination, the act of moving pollen from one flower to the next, is how flowers change into fruit and berries. What the bees get for their work is pollen and nectar that they take back to the colony to be transformed into bee-food.
Honey is one of these foods. Honeybees will travel about 1. Now imagine yourself flying in a plane over farmland — uncountable miles of single crops that all flower at one time and then mature. There are a number of different types of beekeeping. Whether a vegan who eats honey from a balanced beekeeper is still a vegan is entirely down to perspective. Of course this is a hugely contentious issue that evokes strong emotions but for me this is about making a personal, informed decision not driven simply by the definition of a word.
Infighting in the vegan community is not uncommon. Heme was not used in food prior to the development of the Impossible Burger. The company faced the agonizing dilemma of testing it on rats in the hope of earning FDA approval. It did earn FDA approval. And Impossible Foods justified its decision by drawing attention to the potential billions of animals that could be saved by producing the beef-like Impossible Burger for the masses.
But most would agree that the main focus of the vegan movement is to promote the accessibility of plant-based foods. It is also to save the billions of factory-farmed animals who are slaughtered every year. Focusing our efforts on whether or not some people occasionally consume honey from balanced beekeepers seems an ineffective use of valuable time.
Even in small, local, family-run beehives, beekeepers must still keep bees in captivity and take their honey — which is their food — from them. Instead of letting bees eat their own honey, beekeepers in both small farms and in commercial beekeeping often feed bees sugar or high fructose corn syrup — which, as Mother Earth News explains, lacks the nutritional benefits, pH, and enzymes that honey provides to bees.
Additionally, beekeepers also selectively breed bees to boost their productivity; like with other animals, selective breeding leads to a smaller gene pool, less species variety, and frequent disease, according to the Vegan Society.
Not to mention, beekeepers often cruelly treat the queen bee — they clip off her wings to stop her from flying away, and they artificially inseminate her, not unlike what happens to animals on factory farms, according to PETA. And in the winter, some beekeepers kill all their bees and destroy the hives, and start things up again in the spring, when it is easier and cheaper to keep bees alive. Removing honey from your diet may not be the most important principle of veganism, but it is easy to see why many people refuse to use honey after learning about the way bees are used in honey production.
Bees have a very intricate and interesting! It starts with bees flying around to various plants and collecting their nectar, a sugary fluid that plants naturally produce. Bees use their proboscis a straw-like tongue to suck the nectar out of the plant.
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