Aardwolf

Why is honey associated with bears? You’d think people would make honey bottles in the shape of bees.

HONEY - ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THINGS ON THIS EARTH.

hey so that “honey is classified as raw meat” post really bothered me and here’s why

it’s not that someone was wrong on the internet. that’s fine, they weren’t doing it maliciously, don’t find them and send them hate for a mistake. the thing that really bothers me is that so many people believed it. 

thousands of people reblogged it and went “whoa i never knew” and just went on with their day now believing that honey is classified as raw meat with no actual evidence, and to me that serves as a wonderful illustration to the internet’s huge misinformation problem.

the honey thing probably won’t have far reaching consequences, but someday, you’re gonna come across a claim that will. 

you’re gonna come across someone peddling wildly inaccurate medical advice, or wildly inaccurate legal advice, or telling you to report someone for child pornography when they don’t actually have child pornography, and when that happens i hope to god that you have the good sense to do even the barest amount of research before you unthinkingly believe them

misinformation ruins lives. you can be the hero that stops it.

Honeycombs in the wild are amazing.

when people try to talk about how honey is supposedly unethical because we’re stealing the bees’ food I’m just like, genuinely curious if you’re aware that the honey we eat is the result of beekeepers raising colonies and harvesting the excess honey while making sure the bees are all good and fine, and that the honey you buy at the store is from a farm and not just like going into the woods and sticking your hand in a beehive like a bear in a cartoon and stealing the wild bees’ honey

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Thats all well and good but if they actually care about bees they would stop using honey in their product instead of just making a ~green~ marketing campaign

Producing honey does not hurt bees. Bee keepers ensure that bees live long, healthy lives. They always leave bees enough honey to live and maintain their colony. Without bee keepers the world would have much less bees and therefore much less healthy food (that vegans depend on).

You can disagree on the consumption of honey, but please come up with a better excuse than its harmful for bees, because its not.

ugh omg honey shaming is one of my biggest pet peeves

USING HONEY DOES NOT HURT BEES

Using honey ensures that bees are being (well)-kept and encouraged to propagate. You have to be very careful with your bees if you want them to give you quality products. 

Using honey puts more money into the honey industry, allowing beekeepers to keep more bees as well as do more to help, protect, and save bees. 

Conversely, if you stop using honey, not only is honey going to go to waste (bees produce more honey than they need), but people who currently keep bees are going to either turn to a different product (whether because want to make money or because they just can’t afford to keep the bees they love). Their bees are going to end up neglected and/or exterminated, and there will be fewer people contributing to the desperate conservation efforts. 

I get that you want to be nature-friendly but please educate yourself on what that actually means before jumping into every argument you see.

Beekeepers who can’t make enough money selling honey have to send their beehives out to pollinate crops.

Travelling for pollination, incidentally, is much harder on bees than harvesting from one location year-round.

So if vegans want to avoid bee cruelty, they should stop eating all crops pollinated by bees. Here’s a convenient list:

Kiwis, watermelons, squash, zucchini, cashews, cucumbers, apples, mangos, avocados, plums, almonds, peaches, pears, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.

Only buy those crops from farmers who hand-pollinate their crops, like some farms in China now have to do. Keep in mind that thin upper boughs of fruit trees are flimsy, so they send children up to pollinate the top branches. Child labour in agriculture is another complicated subject, and one that I don’t think vegans even think twice about.

“Cruelty-free” is completely impossible, and people with a poor understanding of animal welfare tend to worsen it. Research how bees actually live and how beekeeping works and realize that there is zero harm done to bees by responsibly harvesting their honey.

(Note: I am a vegan who has kept bees and now eats locally-produced honey.)

I can’t go through the #bee tag without cringing at vegans spreading misinformation about bees and beekeepers.

THOUSANDS OF BEES ARE NOT KILLED BY HARVESTING HONEY.

BEEKEEPERS DO NOT TAKE ALL THE HONEY. Bees make excess honey and good beekeepers let some hives grow until they split and “swarm” into new hives because bee populations have a healthy number they tend to stay at.

BEEKEEPERS ARE SOMETIMES NECESSARY. Honeybees are not native to north America y'all. Beekeepers make sure hives are well cared for and don’t succumb to disease, mites or weather. Some also keep communities alive (or voluntarily rehome swarms) that your average person would call an exterminator for.

Big corporate beekeeping is shit though. And made necessary by track farming destroying viable habitat for pollinators. This is why people say you should go local.

NOBODY LOVES BEES MORE THAN BEEKEEPERS. FIGHT ME.