Is eating honey cruel to bees according to vegans?

Answer 1

a lot of bees die in the process of collecting honey therefore it is considered as cruel.

Answer 2

The question is phrased in such a way as to infer that veganism and vegetarianism have issues of cruelty at their heart - while true in some cases, that people choose dietary concerns on the basis of compassion for animals etc - I would not consider this a 'blanket' position - and many vegans are so, because of their belief in the unsuitability of animal matter for human consumption - perhaps even for religious reasons unrelated to 'cruelty'.
To return to the intent of the question - I note some answers refer to honey as an animal product - honey is in fact the nectar of plants - only slightly modified by bees which treat the nectar with ensalivation and store it in cells - to ripen into what we later call honey.
The 'honey' is nectar ripened by bee spit.
It is not animal matter in the strictest sense, though for safety reasons it is categorised that way to establish control laws for transition of 'animal product' across state lines (to avoid spread of bee diseases).
Robbing honey from bees is not cruel - a wise beekeeper ensures enough honey left for the bees - and I must add that bees are 'busy' all the time - they know no rest days - so robbing them is not a big issue. Bees can be 'demoralised' and will 'abscond' from a hive if carelessly 'stressed' - but bees in a well managed hive will have less stress than those in a feral hive struggling with overcrowding and burr comb - the beekeeper is an asset to bees as they are to him.

The bees of course are a critical asset to all horticulture and the attacks on them by man's poisons (thanks Monsanto and others) GM cropping, and the tendency towards monoculture (mass broadacre cropping) are vitally serious issues - more so than whether vegans endorse cruelty by eating honey.
Any vegan who overlooks the healing and health-giving characteristics of honey, is really missing the boat... big time.

Answer 3

According to the official definition of "vegan"- no animal products at all- vegans should not eat honey. However, a lot do, just as a lot of people who call themselves vegetarian eat chicken or fish.
The idea behind the whole "honey is bad" thing is that humans are exploiting the bees; bees make honey for themselves, and humans steal it.
I am not saying this is right or wrong, just that this is the "official" vegan doctrine.

Answer 4

As you will discover, there's a debate interior the vegan community approximately no count if honey is appropriate in a vegan nutrition regimen or no longer. hard-line vegans say quite no longer, others factor out that bees are already exploited interior the monetary pollination amenities that are used to pollinate many of the culmination and greens that vegans consume. no person cries approximately those bees, why are they apprehensive with regard to the bees that make honey? If bees are deserving of the comparable secure practices as fish and chickens and cows, then vegans quite shouldn't get of their automobiles and rigidity on the line. you may quite kill dozens of bugs that way. you're able to to boot in basic terms rigidity with the aid of a residential community and run over peoples puppy canines.

Answer 5

Could be.
Depends on the 'harvest' method, to some.

First, most take far too much honey, basically starving the bees, and to allow them to survive the winter, provide them with some horrible white sugar to live on. Sounds a bit cruel to me. Sure, bees don't have such feeling as to feel that they are being abused (or so it would seem to us), but there's the principle of the matter... Just because they don't know, we know.

If you have your own personal hive and take just a little where basically they'd never know any was missing and never taking enough where they have to be supplemented during the winter etc. I don't have a problem with that.

People are eating far more honey than they need to. It should be seen as a very special and precious thing, not something to be eating on a daily basis etc. We're pigging out on so many things and basically forcing the market to produce unnatural products with added fillers etc. and turning the bees into honey factories as we do with cows and milk. Where do we draw the line? We don't really need honey. We can easily make honey-like products from grains such as malt, which I find to be far better health wise than honey.

Answer 6

The way bees are forced out of hives to get at the honey can be described as cruel... bees are killed sometimes in the process, sometimes hot smoke is used to clear them out. It is still considered an animal product either way and vegans try to avoid any animal products when they can.

I don't think that it's fair to say that collecting honey is ALWAYS cruel, but you can never be sure. Either way, I don't really use or need products with honey, I use agave nectar instead (lower glycemic index, for one).

Answer 7

Veganism is more to philosophy and action...action speaks louder than word, never stop at eating habit alone.

A world without honey - bees die, humans die.

Albert Einstein once wrote that .."IF THE BEES DISAPPEARED OFF THE GLOBE, THEN THE MAN WOULD HAVE ONLY FOUR YEARS OF LIFE LEFT, NO MORE BEES, NO MORE POLLINATION, NO MORE PLANTS, NO MORE ANIMALS, NO MORE MAN".

Answer 8

I found out that in America in winter the majority of the bees are killed off by the owners except for a select few of the bees and the queen bee until pollen is more available in spring. Some vegans feel that this is cruel.


Here is some interesting info:

From a former beekeeper: "Typically, beekeepers are gloved and netted to avoid stings (nearly every bee who stings will die due to her entrails being pulled from her body attached to her stinger.) Then the hives are opened as quickly as possible and the bee's are 'smoked'. Some from a smoldering fire carried in a 'smoker' is pumped into the hive and the bees are 'calmed'. In spite of this, the combs are pulled quickly and many bees are crushed in the process. When a bee is hurt, she releases a chemical message that alerts and activates the hive members who proceed to attack the intruder--giving their lives in the process."

An answer from this link: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AnBrMadknhjRY.pK45eYNnQjzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20070716093805AA6Kbjd

Answer 9

Who would have thought something as innocent as honey could be cruel, but obviously it can be. I'm vegetarian and I don't abstain from honey. I don't generally buy it, but I don't avoid it as an ingredient.

Answer 10

I'm going to reprint something posted by another person on Y! Answers. I think it's appropriate for this topic.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071117131412AAJ1fvk&cp=2

"I am a commercial beekeeper.
That means getting up before dawn, and working in the hot sun until well after it sets, lifting heavy boxes full of thousands of stinging insects each with great care and love.
Of course I love my bees - they are my livestock, and they pay the bills!

Would I be cruel to them?
If I were, it seems pretty clear that they have a way of letting me know. :)

Despite the claim made by Barry the Bee in "Bee Movie", bees hardly notice that we take some of their honey. We put the emptied comb back on the hive, they fill it back up again. (Within limits, the more empty comb you give a hive, the more honey you can remove.)

Clearly, you don't want to take so much honey that the bees might starve, as a colony that survives winter, and is ready for spring is much more valuable than a few additional pounds of honey. A new "split" or "package" will rarely produce a harvestable crop in the first year, so if one has a hive die, one looses an entire year's crop.

Can you harvest honey without killing bees?
Sure you can, you can use something like this:
http://bee-quick.com
The bees move down into the hive, out of the boxes ("supers") you remove, and no one gets hurt - not you and not any bees.

Another "Bee Movie" issue - do smokers cause bees to drop to the floor coughing? No, of course not, as said in a prior answer, it merely masks the "alarm pheromone", so that the hive does not go all gangsta on you, and turn you into a pincushion.

As for Bee Movie in general, what part of "It's a Cartoon" is unclear to anyone?

Starting with "male bees never work at all", I lost count of the number of things they were "wrong" about in that movie before I finished my first handfull of popcorn. No matter, it was entertainment? Want facts?
Watch PBS, or read a book.

As for vegans and others who want to posture and pose that "Honey is mean", or "man is cruel to bees", it has been established that plants communicate "danger" to each other when they are even slightly damaged:
http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_...

Given this, the plants appear to be demonstrating all the traits of self-awareness, and knowledge of danger to be said to be "in fear" when they die at the hands of man.

Offhand, I'd say that the vegans need to explain why plants are less important than bees in terms of who we are going to treat "kindly".

I do everything I can for my bees, from building them houses, to give them regular "medical exams", to treating their diseases, to feeding them in drought and bad years for blooms. A dead bee makes me no honey at all, and can't pollinate anything. Clearly, a "beeKEEPer" is not a bee killer, or he would soon have no more bees to keep.

If anyone is interested in "Colony Collapse Disorder", please understand that almost none of the press reports have gotten the facts right. If you'd like a detailed review of the situation, you can read these articles, published in a magazine for beekeepers:
http://bee-quick.com/reprints"

I used to not eat honey too until I found out what really happens in beehives, from beekeepers themselves. Honey is very vegan, and in fact, if it wasn't for honeybees, no vegetarian or vegans would have any of the following:

Cotton for canvas shoes
Soymeal for soydogs
Watermelon
Rasberries
Pine Trees

et al.

There are no wild bees left alive anymore. Bees, in all effect, are extinct. Only humans are keeping bees alive. Now eat those Golden Ghrahams like a man!