this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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I feel like bees are a bit of a grey area. We're not eating them, we're kind of like landlords that give them a nice place to stay and they pay rent in honey. I'm not vegan so I'm not quite sure what the rationale is for bee stuff.
Best friend's a vegan who raises bees. He doesn't clip wings or use smoke. From what I gather he basically just maintains their boxes, feeds them sugar when it's too cold for em, and collects honey when it's time. Someone is about to come along and say "he's not a vegan. Sounds like a vegetarian" and then I'm going to think "sounds like you're gatekeeping a lifestyle like it's a religion, and not even all vegans who don't use honey agree on whether or not a vegan can use honey" but I won't, because I don't wanna get wrapped up in the nonsense.
But either way, yes, some vegans do use honey. And some, like that theoretical commenter, don't eat anything that casts a shadow.
Anyone who doesn't exclusively survive on naturally dried up lichen ain't no real vegan in my book!
Hmm... Some lichen make use of orobatid mite labour in order to disperse the cells of their photobionts. Are those still ok?
That's why I specified naturally dried up. The mites will have moved to greener pastures, I mean lichens.
Personally I’m not sure the gate keeping you’re observing is all that much of an issue. I think it’s useful to remember many vegans are also public advocates for veganism. It’s important to them that people generally know what they mean when they advocate for veganism.
However, the definition of all words are always in flux. It’s not uncommon to see people call themselves vegan when a more apt description of their lifestyle would be plant based, flexitarian, vegetarian, etc. As such, I think edge cases like your friend take on an outsized importance that goes beyond the morality of your friend eating honey.
Basically, the goal may not be the social exclusion of your friend which is what I think is usually the problematic aspect of gatekeeping.
Beekeeping family here: who the fuck clips bee wings?
Iunno, never personally seen it. Just heard about it online when I first started looking into beekeeping (which I ultimately did not take up).
Still interested in doing it (the keeping not the clipping), if you have any advice on getting started for someone with like 18 dollars between paydays. Lol
also - does this distinction matter? Is someone who runs 100m dash vs an ultra marathon runner both runners? When I run for the bus I'm also running. Sonic the Hedgehog also runs. They have distinctions in context that make sense - but they are all running.
I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with my landlord harvesting my vomit as rent.
"I'm eating it, I promise it's not a sex thing."
If my bank accepted vomit as mortgage payments, they could smack my ass and call me bulimic, I don't care what y'all do with my vomit, let's talk about pool house options and a second car.
I'd be cool with creaming their coffee twice a week if it meant I got my house for no money.
Well landlords are the badguys so...
What if the hives are rent controlled?
Sounds spooked with extra steps
Couple of reasons. One, honey is made not from local pollinators but from European honey bees. Two, European honey bees are really good at producing honey, which means they're more efficient at removing pollen and nectar from flowers, denying food for native pollinators. Three, while only a few bees are directly harmed during honey harvesting, the need for their honey to be harvested means that they've been bred to make big, uniform honeycombs and a glut of excess honey. This makes them more susceptible to diseases, even before you factor in the monoculture nature of their existence.
Essentially, it's not that eating honey is harmful to bees. It's that the creation of honey at scale is cruel both to the bees producing the honey and the native pollinators who get pushed out by them. We (my household) do have honey on occasion, but only from local, small scale honey producers.
Here in Brazil we have Meliponiculture, farming honey from native stingless bees.
Wow, that's interesting! Does the honey differ from the honey bee one?
Depends on the species, but in general the honeys have variation in the nutrients, some considered even more medicinal than that of European Honey Bees.
They usually also have more water content, so unlike "regular" honey, they can more easily spoil.
Do you think there are no vegans in Europe?
Probably yeah. But also the European honeybee is not the only European bee nor pollinator so the argument holds true to some extent.
However I'm not convinced the impact is worse than the monocultures which makes up the majority of our calorie intake. Thousands of hectares of nothing but beets or corn probably does more for killing insect diversity than a handful of beehives, but what do I know.
So my wife went vegan for a bit and the logic is basically any living thing we take advantage of or make their lives more of a labor. So eggs, honey, milk aren't vegan because companies put those animals in situations they normally wouldn't be in in the wild to take advantage and harvest products from them.
Yeah, some vegans draw the line at the animal kingdom. (Plants, algae, mushrooms - these are all living things as well, but one has to eat something.) Some vegans I know do eat honey though. It depends on what feels like animal exploitation to the person.
Eh, I doubt most people care about being vegan for the sake of being vegan, but as has been said, honey bees are bad for pollinators, so from a moral viewpoint, you get to the same conclusion.
Ultimately, though, honey isn't hard to give up. Certainly nothing that I felt was worth contemplating whether it's grey area or not.
At best, it's annoying, because the weirdest products will have honey added. One time, I accidentally bought pickles with honey, and they were fucking disgusting.
Hm? What do you mean?
From this paper:
This is a genuine question btw.
I read an article on this a while back that made me refrain from actually getting bees. I can’t find it right now, but the gist is that domesticated honeybees will compete with a lot of other pollinators (mainly solitary bees) over the exact same food sources.
However, the honeybees have a gigantic advantage in being supervised, housed and generally looked after by the apiary. Which will also employ methods to stimulate hive-growth, driving the hives demand for food.
That is something a solitary bee - or another pollinator depending on the same nutrition - cannot compete with, driving them away.
So, in a nutshell: adding bees to a place already rich in honeybees? Whatever. Adding honeybees into a local ecosystem not having them rn? That will drastically lower biodiversity
I'm no biologist, but as for why they're bad for other pollinators, yeah, what @frosch@sh.itjust.works said sums it up quite well.
I'd like to add that, to my understanding, they're actually relatively ineffective pollinators, too. They might do the highest quantity in total, but I'm guessing primarily because of how many honeybees there are.
I believe, the paper you linked also observes this, at least they mention in the abstract:
...but I don't understand the data. 🫠
As for why this is the case, for one, honeybees are extremely effective at collecting pollen, with their little leg pockets, which reduces the amount of pollen a flower has to offer.
But particularly when they're introduced into foreign ecosystems, pollinators that are specialized for local plants get displaced.
This may mean just a reduction of pollination effectiveness, or it could mean that the honeybees turn into "pollen thieves", i.e. they collect pollen without pollinating the plant.
Here's a paper, which unfortunately no one may read, but the abstract describes such a case quite well: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20583711/
I don't think comparing beekeeping to landlordism makes it sound very ethical at all
One of my best friends is vegan. They won't use anything that comes from animals. Nothing. That includes wool, even though the sheep is harmed in the process. They're absolutely opposed to any animal products or bi-products.
This is such a funny typo
I mean it’s accurate because wool shearers are often rushed with the sheep, hurting them to meet the quota of the day.
The dark vegan. Eats only food that causes as much suffering as possible.
It’s more accurate to say carnivore cannibal.
As long as we canot ask them, if it's ok if we take their honey (consent), it's not vegan. For an counter example, it's fairly easy to get consent from a dog to touch them. Most people are able to tell if they are fine or not.
I find vegan intellect fascinating. I love hearing their responses to my epistomology. They all make it up as they go along. It's very similar to religious beliefs in the way it is personal. Each has their own set beliefs on where to draw the line of what is vegan and what is not.
My personal understanding of the world is that plants aren't so different from animals that they can be classified separately from other food sources. For example, how much different is r-selected reproduction from a fruiting plant. Plants react differently to different colors of light and so do we.
It helps to understand the goal of a vegan. The extent to which we are tied to every living thing on Earth means that many vegans have set impossible goals.
Just fascinating.
I've always wondered if vegetables from a farm that uses horse-drawn tills instead of tractors would be vegan... It's a real question, but everyone I ask thinks that I'm trolling.
Or animal manure, or pesticides
Each vegan will have their own answer. If you are truly curious, and a vegan is sharing their mindset with you, ask them.
Here's my weird question: if faux leather is plastic and someone is vegan for environmental reasons, would leather be preferable? What if it's a byproduct and would otherwise be trashed? These are things I think about as someone who tries to reduce my impact on the environment as much as I feasibly can in a capitalist society.
I'd say no because horses can't consent to being used for this. Horse riding is generally not considered vegan either
I mean I think it can be boiled down pretty simply: cause the least harm to living things that you can personally manage, according to your definition of harm. Having impossible goals isn't necessarily a bad thing. If your impossible goal is to make a billion dollars ethically, and you get to 50 million being 95% ethical, you could still consider that a win, even though you didn't reach your impossible goal.
Even the simple goal of "always being a good person 100% of the time" is probably impossible to achieve over an entire lifetime while meeting every person's definition of it. That doesn't mean it's useless for someone to strive for that within their definition of "good person".
In fact I'd say the vast majority of meaningful, non trivial goals could be considered "impossible".
ethical vegans (and not people who eat plant-based for nutritional reasons, and often get conflated with people doing it for ethics reasons) generally agree on one very simple rule:
To reduce, as much as possible, the suffering inflicted upon animals.
That's it.
Where that line is drawn of course depends on your personal circumstances. Some people require life-saving medicine that includes animal products, and are generally still considered vegan.
I'd like to see what about this confuses you and your epistomology [sic, and that word doesn't mean what you think it means]
What a word salad. Your comment can be applied to anything because people are different lol. All my friends who are dads have different ideas on how to be a dad. Fascinating. It helps to understand the goal of a parent. All my friends with jobs define success in different ways. It’s like they’re all making it up as they go along. Fascinating. It helps to understand the goals of a worker.
It’s ok to set “impossible” goals if you view them as directions rather than destinations.
Fascinating huh?