Vegan + honey = ?

I don't care whether insects feel pain or not. Bees are animals therefore I will not eat honey.

I personally have no problem eating honey. But I respect those who don't eat it.


I think the with bee populations declining worldwide it may well benefit the bees being farmed.

I'm completely against eating honey.
I absolutely abhore the way humans use bees.
The bees are trucked around the country (or which ever country they're from) to pollinate fruit for humans to consume; they're sprayed with a varied amount of pesticides and herbicides by simply being in the field when the same process is occurring on our fruits; they're dying at an unbelievable high rate from Colony Collapse Disorder yet very little is being done about it.
The only way I can see to truly respect these marvelous creatures; who without nothing on land would survive (seriously if the beest go almost everything will die within 4 years) is to not eat their honey as it is for their young (we steal their honey and then replace it with sugar water which is not nutritionally adequate and creates weaker young for the bees. Very much like cows who are stolen from their mothers are fed a nutritionally incomplete formula) and to try to the best of my ability to eat locally grown, organic produce as the bees that fertilize these plants are bees which occur in nature and are attracted to pollinate these plants rather then having been trapped by humans.

(If you can't tell bees are one of my favourite animals. LOL)

I don't eat honey but to be honest I don't fully understand the whole bee thing. I know there is an issue, I just wouldn't know how to explain it to someone.

Bees store honey for the colony to eat in winter and other times when their might not be much food around. They make it for the wellbeing of the colony, not for humans.

There's been heaps of previous threads on this topic,
there are many problems with commerical honey, for starters in some cases they pour antibiotics into the hives (which can lead to antibiotic resistance in humans that eat the honey)

They also harvest all the bees honey & replace it with sugar water (greedy greedy) but apparently this can weaken the colony.

I've also heard they kill the queen bee every year or something?

Not many people in Australia have heard of Colony Collapse Disorder, its big in the US at the moment to the point where farmers have to  hire hives from across the country & they get trucked to their crops for pollination.

They say causes are unknown but experts speculate , GM foods, pesticides etc & other issues associated with the commerical honey industry have caused the problem.

Its hit Australia & its possible it could become an epidemic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unca1QR3nLs

No bees= no pollination= no fruit/veg= no man!

I eat honey occassionally but only from my Uncles farm, he has one hive, amidst his property of fruit trees & doesn't use antibiotics, he doesn't kill the queen or any of the bees & he only harvests some of their honey occassionally,  & the hive still thrives, so I don't have a problem with it.

I also plant lots of bee friendly trees/flowers/habitats etc in my garden to assist them! we have thousands of bees in our yard on a regular basis, nearly all of our trees/shrubs are the flowering kind

I read on some website that if your a Vegan and you eat honey that your a Beegan. Not sure if that's true, but i told my friends that and they immediately insisted i eat a hobo and become a hobogan

If honey is okay then silk is okay. After all they're only insects right?
I hate the way people treat insects.
Just because they're small and they're not cute (to most people) doesn't mean they have any less right to be free of human exploitation.

I agree with you there, Burts Bees (who sell honey/honeycomb products) are funding alot of research into CCD,
But you have to think aswell, it has to be desirable for the argriculture industry to fund research aswell, even things like cotton require pollination from bees.... so even without honey, alot of money/jobs will be lost in agriculture if bees died off.
I don't think its just the mites either, there's a range of issues, one being a mite, in QLD its a beetle, and there has also been alot of record of bees just not returning to their hives (abandoning their young which is very odd for bees), they say they may forget their way home due to all the cellular radiation in the air?

I think the world is just unhealthy & the bees dying is just another symptom of that...