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I’d say his heart was in the right place though as there are some good arguments against beekeeping. I don’t want to be seen as brigading this post but I just want to inform those willing to learn about what environmental consequences the practise of beekeeping actually entails.
Beekeping is one of those things that people seem to consider as beneficial for the environment and naturally wholesome but the industry has a way of making sure people stay misinformed about its actual effects on the environment (as with any industry under capitalism). Beekeeping really is just another one of these things that vegans argue against for a good, albeit misunderstood reason, and it is a little jarring to see how misinformed people are about the subject.
Beekeeping is essentially worsening the insect/pollinator death spiral we have going on right now. Native insects and pollinators are diminishing due to many factors including deforestation, urbanisation, farming (toxic pesticides) and industry. Beekeeping is essentially worsening these issues since the bees start outcompeting the native pollinators. Natural pollinator diversity gets reduced into more of a monoculture as every single bee species that is used in beekeeping is closely related to each other. And since these bees have a natural preference for certain plants while ignoring others, and they lack specific behaviours that native pollinators display it disrupts ecosystems in unpredictable ways and worsens this already existing downwards spiral. Bees get important assistance from beekeepers that native pollinators don’t get which also increases their ability to compete in environments they aren’t necessarily suited for.
I’m not trying to demonize bees here, but I am sort of noticing that most people don’t really know why vegans don’t eat honey and I hope this info makes it more clear.
No.
Can you imagine if that’s how they actually made honey. The amount of effort would take to make just a single jar would be ridiculous.
I mean there are bees vomiting. Bees do spin around. And there is a centrifuge. This is pretty close to true.
Easy hallucination for an LLM to make, based on the available data.
Wait… Are you saying if this happened someone likely learned these “bee facts” from an AI? That is painful. I swear those things are fucking intelligence cancer.
In fact. Centrifuges are being used for nuclear weapons. Which means bees are wmds.
I mean:
No one can be that ignorant. Of course they are milked
From their boo-bees?
That’s where the term “honey boo” comes from. It is intended to evoke images of honey-crusted bee nipples which peasants used to give what looked like a little kiss to get the delicious honey crystals off (they were NOT allowed to otherwise touch the honey, on pain of death, because it belonged to the nearest bishop, and wars were fought over where bishops chose to go for walks, leading to them to having to follow careful paths that kept them from getting closer to bee milking areas than the bishop that earned that honey fair and square by telling those peasants to milk it out of those bees. These paths often cut diagonally through fields, which explains something else but I can’t remember what, but it is a really fun fact, so please enjoy it even if it isn’t fully complete).
They just clip the wings of the queen so it’s functionally impossible for the bees to leave.
Sounds like an American thing to do.
To be noted that’s just a thing that is done commercialy, most beekeepers will not do it and instead will try to have a symbiotic relationship, some (not many ofc) beekeepers will even go as far as letting the bees leave if they want (though, i don’t agree to do leave them go because it will disturb the local fauna as they are not native most of the time)
Edit: IIRC they are native to europe and asia so it isn’t a big problem in those zones ig
And every harvest comes at the cost of many workers’ lives (they defend their reserves and their stinger ripping out kills them). Also they’re given sugar in winter to compensate for the honey taken from them.
That’s shitty. I wonder how common this is for non-factory beekeeping, I can think of several ways this could cause significant problems for the bees above and beyond the obvious one.
As someone who has worked with bees, not common. Most beekeepers should be keeping the queen there by maintaining the correct amount of honey store for hive size. There are queen excluder boxes you can use to protect/encourage new queens to storm, etc etc etc
I’d never heard of wing clipping. That would be terrible. I’m frankly against using smoke with bees and have worked with a few people who also feel the same way. Buy local
I’m frankly against using smoke with bees and have worked with a few people who also feel the same way. Buy local
I feel like buying local is good for various other reasons, but that it doesn’t necessarily guarantee better beekeeping practices. Maybe there ought to be some kind of “humane beekeeping” certification program.
I agree there should be, but I more was thinking farmers market where you can just ask
Yes, it is shitty. So are most things we do to other creatures on earth to prioritize our own survival and well being.
It was only somewhat recently in human history that we’ve moved past the point of needing these systems to survive. Now things like veganism have few to little downsides, except that we’re entrenched in the way we used to do things.
Honey bees are rarely native to where they are kept. They are livestock. Clipping the queen both improves honey production and prevents the swarm from resettling elsewhere and displacing local pollinators.
deleted by creator
we can’t even be not-shitty to each other
veganism have dew
moist
And replace the honey with sugar water and they become deficient. And also they outcompete native bee populations, causing naturally occuring pollinators to decline
i think the amount and the size of lawns without any flowers affects the natural pollinator population at much greater capacity.
People pay to ride a tilt-a whirl. Let the bees have their fun.
It’s funny how people can believe something like that despite there being a thing called “the Internet” where you can easily look up stuff (and where they made that comment). They get some points for caring about bees, though.
For example, some people believed this post.
I mean, it’s not that unbelivable that someone that thinks like this exist, i once met a person that belived that the sun and the moon where the same thing and the moon was actually the other half of the sun
(Which is crazy considering you can sometimes see both in the sky…)
i mean, i’ve seen people say much more stupid things. The existence of the person described is not improbable
Confidentiality?
Confidently corrected
I suspect that was part of the joke
Doesn’t really make sense though. I assume autocorrect
If only that was the reality and not that they decimate the native pollinator population causing massive problems and serious implications for the future
All that, plus honey is just kinda mid. Like, most people just eat it because it seems “healthier” than pure sugar, but nutritionally there’s very little difference (yes, honey is good at killing bacteria and fungi, but that doesn’t really matter when you digest it). Just replacing it with Agave Syrup is barely an inconvenience and solves so many environmental problems.
Someone has never had good honey, I guess.
Calls honey mid and unsustainable, supports agave syrup in the same breath. Moving the environmental problems from your neighborhood to Oaxaca is not solving them.
Mhm Bee vomit.
The only case where it does tastes better coming out than going in.
Wait then how DO they make honey?
Well they do vomit it, just without human assistance. FWIW though, a honeybee produces about a single teaspoon in its whole life, and also tame honeybee colonies tend to psuh out natural honeybee populations, so whether it’s ethical to eat honey or not is a fair question.
FWIW though, a honeybee produces about a single teaspoon in its whole life
Keep in mind though that a honey bee worker only has a working lifespan of a few weeks (though they can survive for months if born during the cold off seasons where they stay huddled in the hive), and each hive has between 40,000 and 80,000 bees. Kept hives also don’t need as much of the honey they produce since the beekeeper can control for climate, colony size, and other factors that increase consumption.
Pushing out native bees is definitely a major problem, I agree on that, though beekeepers should be managing their colonies to prevent them from splitting and creating new hives.
Unless you’re in Eurasia, the natural populations aren’t honeybees.
No that’s Minions right?
Bees have a separate stomach just for storing nectar that doesn’t have any digestive juices, so it’s not vomit vomit, but they do swallow the nectar down as they drink it from flowers and then regurgitate it back up into a cell in the wax comb back at the hive. They then evaporate most of the water out of it with air from their wings. When it’s full of honey, they cap the cell off with more wax.
At some point the beekeeper takes a portion of the honeycomb out of the hive, and brushes any bees still on it off into the hive. The caps are cut off to let the honey out, and then typically it is centrifuged to get the honey out quickly. There’s a lot more details of course, but that’s the jist of it.
I’d love to hear them explain what series of events led to that discovery
They most likely found out about honey extractors (spins uncapped honey frames around very fast to extract honey from the comb) without knowing about how honey extractors actually work (they are spun after the bees have been removed).
TIL about centrifugal honey extractors
The source of most of my bee knowledge:
