I was curious about why honey is considered non-vegan and found this post. If any of this information is outdated then I’m happy to hear more about this
Ok, beekeeper, non-vegan here. I've got no horse in the vegan race, but I do know my bees and here is the sad truth: beekeeping is responsible for the decline of world-wide bee population for the last (roughly) 150 years, and for the precipitous decline since 1947.
Beekeeping as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the Langstroth hive has been bad for bees. This is mostly because the hive design has movable frames and opens from the top. These innovations led to highly interventionist beekeeping, and copious fucking with the bees.
The movable frame allows the beekeeper to easily remove, inspect, replace, and swap comb, and led to migratory beekeeping. Bees are now trucked by the tens of thousands of hives across the country with the seasons for the pollination business (which is a bigger than the honey business). The results is that diseases and bee pests move too. The biggest colony killer in the US right now is the Varroa mite, introduced from Asia by humans in 1988, and spread by humans to hives across the country.
The opening from the top destroys the bees' carefully maintained nestduftwarmebingdung, the nest atmosphere. Bees maintain an anti-microbial sauna inside the hive, at a contant tempurature with a complex scent. They can go into fever-mode, raising the temp to kill off infection. The scent helps maintain communication and defenses. Opening the hive destroys the atmosphere. It takes the bees days to reestablish, and is a costly expense of energy they need for foraging, building, and preparing for winter. This weakens the bees, compromising their immune system and leaving them susceptible to infection and invaders.
Then there's honey. Bees spend all season making honey stores so that they can survive the winter. The beekeeper comes along and takes it, then feeds the bees sugar syrup in the winter. This also weakens the bees. Honey is a complex, nutritious bee food. Sugar water is a simple, inadequate food. This is something like you farming all season and stocking up for the winter. You've canned and preserved your veg, and filled your freezer with meat, ready for the hard, unproductive winter. Then someone comes along, takes all your food, and replaces it with Twinkies. You'll survive the winter on Twinkies, but you'll be in pretty bad health come spring. (Although, like the bees with sugar, you'll happily eat the Twinkies, because, yum.)
In the pursuit of larger honey harvest, beekeepers have been artificially increasing the size if the bee's comb cell for about 100 years, by using comb foundation. Bigger cells is thought to mean more honey. So the bees you see today (with some exceptions) are "large-cell" bees, bigger than nature made them. Bigger cells means the workers are too big and the drones are too small (bees left on their own will make different sized cells for each type of bee). This weakens the bees. Some bees bred generations on foundation have lost their ability to create comb on their own.
These weak, immuno-compromised bees are then protected by the beekeepers with pesticides and anti-biotics placed in the hive to deal with the disease and pests that the bees can no longer fight off. This poisons the honey (yum!) and the bees, and breeds resistant pests.
Beekeeping is also dominated by artificial breeding of queens, which eliminates the Darwinian battle of the queens which nature uses to find the strongest queen. This weakens the genetics of the bees, for thousands of generations.
Most, in fact almost all, beekeeping is industrial farming, equivalent to factory farming chickens or cattle. And it has devastated the bees.
There are exceptions: look into vertical top bar hives (which open from the bottom except once a year); chemical-free beekeeping; and spring-harvest honey (taken from the surplus after winter is over).
A note about honey: most of the honey you buy at the grocery store is not. It is heated and filtered and pollen-free, removing the extraordinary health benefits of honey, cut eith corn syrup, beet syrup or other sweeteners, and laced with pesticides and anti-biotics. If you want honey, buy unfiltered, unheated honey, from a beekeeper you know. If you want honey and are concerned about the bees, buy from a beekeeper using Warré topbar hives, doing a surplus harvest.
A note about Colony Collapse Disorder: CCD is not a mystery, as is often reported. CCD is caused by industrial farming pesticides, which destroy bees' navigational abilities, and they can't find their way back to the hive. The whole "it's mysterious" thing is a lie promoted by the chemical companies, primarily Bayer. But in the context of bees weakened by generations of industrial beekeeping, trying to forage on thousands of acres of monoculture crops, having been trucked thousands of miles from their home territory, it is an easy lie to sell.
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