What is the vegan argument against honey?
For some vegans, this extends to honey, because it is produced from the labor of bees. Honey-avoiding vegans believe that exploiting the labor of bees and then harvesting their energy source is immoral — and they point out that large-scale beekeeping operations can harm or kill bees.
Asked to clarify how migratory beekeeping is different from honey, given that bees are mistreated in both cases, PETA senior media liaison Catie Cryar wrote in an email that, while it’s difficult to avoid fruits and vegetables that have been created through migratory beekeeping, “everyone can easily avoid honey, which is made by bees for bees, and instead enjoy delicious vegan options such as agave nectar.” Veganism “shouldn’t be about adhering to rigid dogma for dogma’s sake but rather about making choices that bring about positive change. Ideally, the use of products that involve harming animals should be avoided, but it’s impossible to be 100
There’s never been a better time to be a half-assed vegetarian. Five years ago, the American Dialect Society honored the word flexitarian for its utility in describing a growing demographic—the “vegetarian who occasionally eats meat.” Now there’s evidence that going flexi is good for the environment and good for your health. A study released last October found that a plant-based diet, augmented with a small amount of dairy and meat, maximizes land-use efficiency. In January, Michael Pollan distilled the entire field of nutritional science into three rules for a healthy diet: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” According to a poll released last week, Americans seem to be listening: Thirteen percent of U.S. adults are “semivegetarian,” meaning they eat meat with fewer than half of all their meals. In comparison, true vegetarians—those who never, ever consume animal flesh—compose just 1 percent.percent ‘pure,’ ” she said.
Even the vegans who abstain from honey end up dining on the sweat and hemolymph of exploited bees. There isn’t really an alternative: We can’t replace our insects of burden with machines, as we’ve done for the mules that once pulled our tractor rakes. You might try to do right by seeking out wind-pollinated grains and fruits tended by wild insects. But what about the bugs that inevitably perish in the course of any large-scale agriculture? Even the organic farmers are culpable: They may not spray synthetic pesticides, but they do make use of natural chemicals and predators to kill off unwanted animals.
In the face of this insectile carnage, vegans fall back on a common-sense dictum that animal suffering should be “reasonablyavoided” as opposed to “avoided at any cost.” By this logic, it’s not a sin to treat a termite infestation that’s imperiling your house, nor should you worry over the gnats that get squashed on your windshield whenever you drive to the farmer’s market. But that doctrine won’t absolve us for eating honey. In the first place, honey is quite easy to avoid—especially compared with everything else in the Vegan Society’s codex of forbidden foodstuffs. (A scrupulous eater must also attend to calcium mesoinositol, sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, disodium guanylate, and dozens more unpronounceable, animal-derived chemicals.) Honey doesn’t fill any nutritional gap, nor is it the only acceptable vegan sweetener.
From a practical perspective, all this back-and-forth doesn’t help anyone (or any animal). You either eat honey or you don’t; to debate the question in public only makes the vegan movement seem silly and dogmatic. According to Matthew Ball, the executive director of Vegan Outreach, the desire for clear dietary rules and restrictions makes little difference in the grand calculus of animal suffering: “What vegans do personally matters little,” he says. “If we present veganism as being about the exploitation of honeybees, it makes it easier to ignore the real, noncontroversial suffering” of everything else. Ball doesn’t eat honey himself, but he’d sooner recruit five vegans who remain ambivalent about insect rights than one zealot who follows every last Vegan Society rule.
That may be the most important lesson to come out of this debate: You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Q. Is a bee an insect?
A. Yes. Bees share insect characteristics including having 2 pairs or wings and 6 legs. More detail below.
Fact:
The scientific study of insects is called ‘entomology’.
Entomologists perform a number of very important jobs, from working in tropical medicine to helping with criminal investigation forensic entomology.
Q. Is a bee a bug, fly or wasp?
A. No, although bees, flies, wasps and bugs are insects, they share a number of different physical characteristics, although wasps are very closely related to bees. You can read more about this below.
Q. Are bees invertebrates?
A. Yes, bees have no internal backbone and so are invertebrates (members of the animal kingdom that have no backbone).
Q. Is a bee an animal?
A. Yes, in so far as bees are part of the Animal Kingdom along with other invertebrates and vertebrates. Bees have and exoskeleton in common with some (but not all) other members of the animal kingdom.
Q. Are bees mammals?
A. No. Despite having hair, bees are cold-blooded invertebrates that lay eggs. Mammals are always warm-blooded vertebrates that give birAn insect is an invertebrate (animal without an internal backbone), and insects have:
What makes bees an Insect:
An insect is an invertebrate (animal without an internal backbone), and insects have:
- a body in 3 parts: head, thorax and abdomen.
- a pair of antennae,
- 3 pairs of jointed legs and
- compound eyes.
A bee has all of these features, and is an insect. You can contrast this with say, a spider, which is not an insect but an arachnid, having 8 legs (4 pairs), no antennae, and 2 body parts (a head and thorax which are merged into one body part, and the abdomen).
The honey industry and the environment
For some, the environmental benefits of a plant-based lifestyle is a major factor when deciding to go vegan. And honey production isn’t always eco-friendly. In some cases, farmed honey bees are outcompeting and endangering wild honey bee populations, and transporting honey (like many food products) long distances in trucks contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.
In the winter, bees need to eat their honey to survive which decreases production. Large industrial beekeeping operations often use cheap sugars to sustain the hives which aren’t any better for the bees than they are for you. Some industrial scale beekeepers kill off bee colonies altogether in the winter. Why? It is too expensive to maintain them.
But there are sustainable options. There are many fantastic beekeepers helping honey bee populations and producing honey for their local communities. Environmentally focused beekeepers know how to Can vegans eat honey?
The world of bees and beekeepers is unfamiliar to most of us. What most of us do know, however, is that that bee population is on the decline. That’s a real problem, and not just for the bees. Bees are necessary for about a third of all food grown on Earth!
Humans are part of a natural ecosystem that depends heavily on bees as pollinators. Did you know around 80-95% of natural plant species depend on animal-mediated pollination? Crazy, right? And those plants are the foundation of almost every land-based food chain, so the loss of pollinators could have disastrous ramifications.
build and strengthen their bee colonies without harming native bee populations; they also sell their products locally.
Colony Collapse:
Colonies of bees have disappeared over the last 15 years for unknown reasons. This “colony collapse disorder” shows that as many as 90 percent of bees have disappeared, never to return, states National Geographic…. STRESS, INSECTICIDES, UNEDUCATED BEEKEEPERS ARE KILLING OUR HONEYBEES, AND REMEMBER WITHOUT THEM THERE IS NO US, NO EARTH, WITHOUT OUR POLLINATORS, TO POLLINATE OUR CROPS, FRUIT TREES, ALL OF OUR FOOD SOURCES.
How long would humans survive without bees?
Bees also provide food for some bird species, so if a cataclysmic event sent all our bees into a rapture, the aftershocks would ripple up the food chain.
If bees disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live. The line is usually attributed to Einstein, and it seems plausible enough. After all, Einstein knew a lot about science and nature, and bees help us produce food.
“BEE KIND AND PROTECT OUR POLLINATORS ALL OF THEM” Tia
Unfortunately, that rapture may becoming. While incidences of colony collapse disorder—or entire hives being wiped out overnight. We are losing thousands of colonies per year. ACShilton2017
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The cultivation of plants, especially agave, is dependent on bees and bats. Since bees play a particularly crucial role in agave pollination, revered tequila-makers PATRÓN have committed to developing flavorful tequila that is mindful of all aspects of the agave-producing process, including bee pollination.Aug 25, 2021 reference Patron..
The plight of pollinators
Honey bees alone pollinate 80 percent of all flowering plants, including more than 130 types of fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, bee populations have dropped alarmingly across North America, as have the populations of many other pollinator species.Jun 22, 2020
Your Food Wouldn’t Bee Here Without Them: What and When Bees Pollinate
Without bees, we would not have many of the vegetables and fruits we eat every day. Pollinators such as bees, birds, bats, beetles, and other small insects pollinate over 1,200 crops. Between $235 and $577 billion of annual global food production depends on the direct contributions of pollinators, and almost one out of every three bites of food you eat is made possible by pollinators!
Pollinators also add $217 billion to the global economy.
Honey bees are an indispensable part of that—in the United States, they account for between $1.2 and $5.4 billion in agricultural productivity. The value of honey bees is powerful. A colony of honeybees is worth 100x more to a community than the beekeeper.
Bees pollinate crops such as apples, cranberries, melons, almonds, and broccoli. Fruits like blueberries and cherries are 90% dependent on honey bee pollination, and during bloom time, almonds depend entirely on honey bees for pollination.
To pollinate the nearly 1.2 million acres of almond-bearing orchards in California’s Central Valley, the California almond industry needs 1.8 million honey bee colonies.
The fruits and vegetables you eat on a daily basis are also made possibly by honey bee pollination, including but not limited to watermelons, pumpkins, squashes, zucchinis, lentils, tomatoes, strawberries, mangos, avocados, plums, peaches, apricots, pomegranates, pears, blackberries, raspberries, grapes, peanuts, macadamia nuts, mustard seeds, coconuts, soybeans, and coffee.
The Honey bee (Apis mellifera) is one of the most recognisable and important of all insects. Most people are familiar with the products of honey bees specifically honey, beeswax and royal jelly.
However, Honey bees have an extremely important role in the pollination of crops. It is estimated that the pollination services provided by bees (not just Honey bees) in North America is worth approximately $14 billion. In the UK it was estimated that the value of the pollination services provided by Honey bees and Bumble bees was around £170 million for outdoor crops (fruit, oil seed rape etc.) and £30 million for greenhouse crops (tomatoes, peppers etc).
Despite this it is the production of honey that captures the imagination and it is easy to forget that it is regurgitated by the bees! A concentrated form of flower nectar stored by certain bees for their young, honey has been sought since earliest times. There is a 9000-year-old cave painting in Spain depicting the gathering of wild honey and beehives are illustrated on friezes in ancient Egyptian tombs.
Reference: Amateur Entomology Society…London, SW7 5Z 1997-2022 Amateur Entomologists’ Society
Reference: Gia Mora, updated July 5, 2022