I'll say up front I am NOT an expert. Most of my knowledge is gathered along the way and some of it is, I am sure, anecdotal. For instance, all bees you see out and flying about are female. They do all the work. Thus: worker bees. The men stay at home and service the queen. Drones. Bees are great. We cannot exist without them. They are the main pollinators of everything we eat. Try as we might, we as humans cannot possibly duplicate what bees do for our food supply. Here's the hardline from the vegan perspective: "In common with other animals kept to produce food products bees are farmed and manipulated, and the honey they produce for themselves is taken from them. Vegans do not eat products taken from any animal, including bees, because it is neither desirable nor necessary to exploit animals in order to obtain food for humans."
Exploit? Aren't you exploiting bees by simply eating ANYTHING? After all, they worked for it. They worked hard. I just want to know where the line is drawn. If you give bees a home on your property, is that expecting something from them in return, even if you aren't taking their honey? Keeping bees is a wonderful thing. I don't eat a lot of honey myself, but I would keep bees just to pollinate my garden. This, apparently, is not correct. I would be enslaving them. Again, I fail to see how providing creatures with a good place to live and benefiting from their labor is such a bad thing. It's symbiotic.
Honey and bee pollen is amazing for our health. Mother Nature provides something that is so good for us, but because commercial practices are bad, the whole thing is bad? I go back to the beekeepers I have known. They won't take more than they should, and they are very careful about everything. And I feel they know more about Nature and the ways of things than most "gimme processed soy product" vegangelicals. What if you are NOT exploiting them? What if you have that symbiotic relationship with them? Why is it still wrong? Commercial ANYTHING is pretty much bad, so can we take things case by case and quit overreacting to everything??
Bees need our help. They have problems. How many people know about Colony Collapse Disorder? I do. Beekeepers do. And they try to protect their hives. Isn't that a good thing? Or must all bees be free-range because of that whole expecting something from them thing? Wild bees are in trouble and keeping hives might help. So if it is said that no bees should be kept, yet they all dies because no bees were kept and protected, well then...
Say goodbye to your food. When the cannibalism hits because all plants are dead, certain people will go first.
Just sayin'. :)
You can tell me I'm full of crap and to quit picking on non-omnivores. Fine. I just want answers. Because this defies logic to me, and I want logic. Be logical and I will leave you alone. But right now, I just want answers. Anyone?
What I don't understand, and I will say I'm a semi-vegaterian (I only eat small amounts of meat and I have to know how the animal was raised), is how vegans can eat non-fair trade food. It's okay to exploit humans but not animals?
ReplyDeleteLisa, that is SUCH a good question that I think I have my next post ready to go. Perhaps it's OK to exploit humans because we choose to allow ourselves to be exploited? That, of course, is laden with facetiousness.
ReplyDeleteIt has been my experience that most vegans are not experts either.
ReplyDeleteI would rather eat honey and apricots than wear shoes made out of polyvinal chloride or eat Agave Nector flavored with potentially cancerous chemicals. That is what "Discount" and "Vegan" friendly honey is these days. Not much better than High Fructose Corn Syrup.
ReplyDeleteIt is time to be realistic and bring some humanity back into the human race. At this point, the Honeybee would be all but extinct without this exploitation. Then we wouldn't have fruits and vegetables to eat in the quantity required. We'd have to rely on Soylent Green and where would the vegans be then?
My parents kept backyard bees for about ten years when I was a kid, pretty much by accident. A swarm headed into a tree on our property, and my dad got help from another beekeeper to move them into frame hives. My parents took care of them, made sure there were enough pollinating plants around that they could make what they needed, supplemented with sugar syrup in lean years or when the weather went bonkers, and were very careful when extracting honey for us to make sure the bees still had ample for themselves and the hive. When the weather got crazy cold, they would set up a little heated tent (not much, just enough so they wouldn't die) around the hives. I learned a lot from them, about bees specifically, but also about how bees and animals can exist together to one another's benefit.
ReplyDeleteNot on topic, but did you know that in cold climates in the winter, all the bees in the hive bunch together in a big ball, with the queen in the center? The closer you are to the middle of the clump, the more bee-generated body heat is around and the better your odds of making it till spring. A lot of the ones on the outside of the ball expire during the cold months, but their presence still helps the inner circle stay warm.
Bees are cool.
The bee ball is called a "cluster." The bees actually orbit within the cluster. The queen is always in the center. The interior bees move to the outside to cool off, and the outer bees will move toward the center to warm up. It's like a bee atom.
DeleteI'll step up to the plate. I'll admit it. I'm a beekeeper. A put-them-in-hives-and-eat-lots-of-honey kind of beekeeper. I'm here to defend my kind.
ReplyDeleteBeekeepers are in tune with the planet, in touch with the seasons, observant of all the changes that go on in our planet as we course through the heavens. Why? Because the bees have taught us. Bees are noble, hard working creatures. They have a society, a heirarchy, a system. Every bee does its job because inside every tiny bee brain, they know that cooperation means life.
The bees are dying. It becomes harder and harder for feral colonies to survive as each year goes by, because of lots of things - neoniconitoid (sp?) pesticides, varroa mites, africanization, pollution, now the zombie fly. Before I put in my hives - my neatly stacked Langstroth hive boxes - I made an acute observation.
My vegetables plants weren't producing fruit. In delving into the cause, a horrible realization was made.
There were no bees.
None.
Not a single bee to be found in my yard. What? How? Off to the internet for research, and bam. I fall in love with the honey bee, take a course, now there are lots and lots of bees in our neighborhood. All mine. My neighbors stop me on the street, to happily report that they saw bees!
YES, I take honey off the hives, but a good beekeeper only takes the excess, and makes sure enough honey is left for winter food.
Beekeeping isn't slavery. Bees are free to swarm wherever they like, and they do, quite often. A good beekeeper will tell you that swarms are good. Beekeepers do everything in their power to make a bee's life easier. We feed them, check them for mites, split the hives when they get crowded. Beekeepers are the reason you have food to eat.
Have you hugged a beekeeper today? Visit my etsy shop at www.LeesBeesNJ.etsy.com for stuff made from my friendly honeybees.