I know that some vegans/vegetarians dont eat honey or use any bee based products and i was just wondering what peoples views are on this. Does anyone avoid such products, and if so what lead them to this decision?

I personally consume honey, but I am not vegan. I am vegetarian, but minimally lacto-ovo.

However, I don't buy products which contain beeswax because I am allergic to it. ;-)

If you do a search for honey or bees here, you'll get a lot of results.

I don't eat honey. There's a long explanation, but in short, taking the honey from bees is exploiting them and taking their own products/food. Since veganism is about doing the least harm possible, consuming honey isn't vegan.

I use honey frequently. I love the taste, I love that it never goes bad (how cool is that?), and I love the healthly properties of honey. I do recall that when I discovered that vegans don't eat honey, I paused and thought about it for awhile before consuming it again. I understand why vegans don't eat honey, but I decided that I wanted to include it in my life.

One change I did make after learning about vegan objection to honey, is that I have become appreciative of the bees and give thanks before consuming what they have made. Thanks, bees!

I know that bee keepers often work in conjunction with farmers to help pollenate their crops. I wonder how much honey people consume from bees is made using the bees for this dual purpose... to give us our veggies and fruits, our flowers.... and to get honey?

Most commercial honey is made from clover pollen.

Occasionally you'll see something like orange honey (made when the bees pollinated orange trees). But you never see cucumber honey, for example. I'm not sure what happens to the honey made from vegetable pollen, but that's not the honey you see on the store shelves.

i live in an area where we are very much for sustainable living. i have actually seen "red bell pepper honey" at the farmer's market, and it's really good, too.... it's locally produced..

I eat honey. Without the bees, we have little produce. We need the bees to survive...and with overloaded hives, they will swarm , which cuts down on their pollination. I currently have eucalyptus honey and avocado honey in my cupboard. Wild bees are not enough anymore. Bee keepers are a vital asset.

after much consideration today...it's not harming the bees, as I would figure there would be no honey if the farmer's "farming" the honey meant that it harmed the bees (and bees died, etc...)...the populations would deplete...

on another line of thought...those bees are doing what they do naturally (since there alive, they mine as well be making honey ^_^)...they aren't thinkng about it, and they are OK with it otherwise they'd sit there and not do anything...unlike a cow that literally sits there and is forced to do something that it should only do for a calf.....and it's terrain is very small...bees tend to not go very far and always will go back to the hive, so in that respect, even if they were kept in some greenhouse of sorts, they would always go back to their hive, and they probably wouldn't think of it anyhow.

I still need to do more reading on it, and it's funny that I was thinking about it today.

It's like if humans naturally pooped and some alien came down and decided they like the way our poop tastes ^_^ I probably wouldn't care if they ate it. (I realize that that statement is a bit off the wall, but that's just an opinion).

health standpoints: full of vitamins, specifically B6 and possibly other B vitamins, which means healthy hair and better metabolism...

Plus!!! If produced local to your residence, it helps prevent those [locally caused] allergies when pollen counts go up (so long as you consume it regularly).

i am lacto-ovo--who doesnt eat much dairy--but i dont eat honey or use products with honey--just feel its wrong.

peace and love

jenn:pibo:

http://www.vegetus.org/honey/honey.htm

Honey is bee's vomit!!. Say no more...

there's a good explanation of why honey isn't vegan on the vegan societys web page - i'd post the link but i'm too new :(

Basically some bees are killed when the combs are removed/replaced, the queens wings are usually removed so the bees cannot swarm, queens are killed when their egg-laying rate lowers, queens are transported mail order and frequently die due to rough-handling or over-heating/freezing, and the honey we take is supposed to feed the hive over the winter - instead it's replaced with artificial pollen so bees can keep making honey all through the year.

Another problem is the introduction of exotic bee species to other countrys because they produce more honey, or a 'nicer' honey, than the native species. These new species can dominate the natural bees and drive them out of their environment.

thanks for the info ^_^ sounds kinda not good...

I'm still erring on the side of not consuming it....I probably will for a while and will buy alternatives until a decision is made. While I'd claim to be vegan, it is for health reasons moreso than for the animals, although I'd prefer animals not be put in pain....soo......maybe more a health strict-vegetarian. Labels are very difficult it seems. I don't touch dairy for personal use.

Beehives are taken around to orchards to pollinate the trees so fruit will form. What methods of pollination do vegans support, and how do you promote them?

:help: are you trying to start a debate with me? Cuz I plead ignorance, so thank you for questioning that.


I said I was erring on the side of not consuming honey....did I miss something?

:junk:

Don't know if Ludi was simply bringing up yet another thought rather than replying directly to you, Butterfly.

I am glad you're willing to try to give up honey for at least a little while while you make a decision. Depending on how you use honey, agave nectar makes a good substitute, but it's not as thick.

The first vegan I ever knew continued to eat honey, and we did talk about it quite a lot. I have decided NOT to eat honey.

There is a very simple reason for this - vegans do not believe in using animals or animal products for food, clothing, etc. Bees=animals. Therefore, bees are not a food source, and they should not end up in our cosmetics, candles, soaps, etc.

Sure, we could argue that it 'doesn't hurt the bees' (how would you like having your legs ripped off?), that they're 'making honey anyway' (cows make milk anyway, so should we eat that too?), that we don't like bees (maybe I don't like cats, but that doesn't mean I should eat them for dinner), etc.

But, they're just bees, we think. Aah. There's the root of the problem. If we think they're 'just bees', then we've decided to create a hierarchy of animal life, and we've decided that certain animals (usually mammals) are not going to be food sources in that hierarchy, but that other animals (like bees) are going to be food sources.

Which leads to two questions: are we assuming that we are at the top of this hierarchy and can sit in judgment of other animals? That's a very un-vegan sentiment. And why are we drawing the line at bees? Why not include, say, shrimp? They're nasty little buggers (not cute and fuzzy like other animals), so why should we care if we eat them? It might even be true that they don't feel pain - so what's the big deal?

The big deal is that there are a lot of things we do not know about other animals (like whether they feel pain, whether they can 'think', whether they have rich emotional lives). Instead of waiting until we figure all this out (and eating animals and their products in the meantime), we have decided to NOT eat the animals or their products. We may never know the answers to those questions. The questions, then, are beside the point.

So, it does not matter whether bees feel pain, or whether they'd make honey anyway, or whether we'd do them any harm in gathering honey. The point is that they are animals, and we're just not going to eat them or their products.

On the question of pollination, which some people have raised:
If bees were not commercially raised on industrialized bee farms, the non-commercial bees would still pollinate orchards, plants, flowers, etc. I don't think vegans would even have a problem with people building artificial bee hives to give bees a place to live near orchards. The problem is thinking of bees as something we can manipulate for our own use, like a machine. We're not supposed to think of animals that way.

Let us look at it this way: vegans are against speciesism, which is like racism - the idea that some species are just plain better than others. And if we start defining what we can and cannot eat according to whether or not the animal is intelligent, feels pain, has a rich emotional life, etc., then we've got a big problem, because then we'd want to apply those criteria to all sorts of animals, to see if we should eat them or their products.

Instead, we choose to just not eat ANY animals or their products.

Otherwise, we could be left with a situation where we could argue that it's okay to eat humans who don't feel pain, aren't intelligent (usually due to brain injury), and have no emotional life.

I think the issue here is partly a visual one, too. Honey, after all, does not look like a bleeding hunk of animal muscle, nor is it squirted out of an animal's udder. We have all these images of honey and honey stirrers near teacups in advertisements, home magazines, etc. We think of honey as pretty. Most vegans probably find pictures of butchered meat to be NOT pretty. And most vegans are probably not at all attracted to images of milk (I know when I see the milk ads, I think those giant glasses of milk look pretty gross.) But we don't have any visual problems with honey.

That doesn't make it acceptable as a food. We can't let visual imagery be the defining factor in what we do and do not eat. (Otherwise, we would only be interested in saving the cute and fuzzy animals, and wouldn't care about, say, shrimp or crabs, because we don't find them cute and cuddly. But that's not a vegan way of thinking.)

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents on the issue. Hope that helps.

Piratebean

The first vegan I ever knew continued to eat honey, and we did talk about it quite a lot. I have decided NOT to eat honey.

There is a very simple reason for this - vegans do not believe in using animals or animal products for food, clothing, etc. Bees=animals. Therefore, bees are not a food source, and they should not end up in our cosmetics, candles, soaps, etc.

Sure, we could argue that it 'doesn't hurt the bees' (how would you like having your legs ripped off?), that they're 'making honey anyway' (cows make milk anyway, so should we eat that too?), that we don't like bees (maybe I don't like cats, but that doesn't mean I should eat them for dinner), etc.

But, they're just bees, we think. Aah. There's the root of the problem. If we think they're 'just bees', then we've decided to create a hierarchy of animal life, and we've decided that certain animals (usually mammals) are not going to be food sources in that hierarchy, but that other animals (like bees) are going to be food sources.

Which leads to two questions: are we assuming that we are at the top of this hierarchy and can sit in judgment of other animals? That's a very un-vegan sentiment. And why are we drawing the line at bees? Why not include, say, shrimp? They're nasty little buggers (not cute and fuzzy like other animals), so why should we care if we eat them? It might even be true that they don't feel pain - so what's the big deal?

The big deal is that there are a lot of things we do not know about other animals (like whether they feel pain, whether they can 'think', whether they have rich emotional lives). Instead of waiting until we figure all this out (and eating animals and their products in the meantime), we have decided to NOT eat the animals or their products. We may never know the answers to those questions. The questions, then, are beside the point.

So, it does not matter whether bees feel pain, or whether they'd make honey anyway, or whether we'd do them any harm in gathering honey. The point is that they are animals, and we're just not going to eat them or their products.

On the question of pollination, which some people have raised:
If bees were not commercially raised on industrialized bee farms, the non-commercial bees would still pollinate orchards, plants, flowers, etc. I don't think vegans would even have a problem with people building artificial bee hives to give bees a place to live near orchards. The problem is thinking of bees as something we can manipulate for our own use, like a machine. We're not supposed to think of animals that way.

Let us look at it this way: vegans are against speciesism, which is like racism - the idea that some species are just plain better than others. And if we start defining what we can and cannot eat according to whether or not the animal is intelligent, feels pain, has a rich emotional life, etc., then we've got a big problem, because then we'd want to apply those criteria to all sorts of animals, to see if we should eat them or their products.

Instead, we choose to just not eat ANY animals or their products.

Otherwise, we could be left with a situation where we could argue that it's okay to eat humans who don't feel pain, aren't intelligent (usually due to brain injury), and have no emotional life.

I think the issue here is partly a visual one, too. Honey, after all, does not look like a bleeding hunk of animal muscle, nor is it squirted out of an animal's udder. We have all these images of honey and honey stirrers near teacups in advertisements, home magazines, etc. We think of honey as pretty. Most vegans probably find pictures of butchered meat to be NOT pretty. And most vegans are probably not at all attracted to images of milk (I know when I see the milk ads, I think those giant glasses of milk look pretty gross.) But we don't have any visual problems with honey.

That doesn't make it acceptable as a food. We can't let visual imagery be the defining factor in what we do and do not eat. (Otherwise, we would only be interested in saving the cute and fuzzy animals, and wouldn't care about, say, shrimp or crabs, because we don't find them cute and cuddly. But that's not a vegan way of thinking.)

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents on the issue. Hope that helps.

Piratebean
I worship you. :wayne:

lol

Very interesting line of reasoning, Piratebean. I enjoyed reading your post. I guess from my perspective, we all draw lines that we will/won't cross. The only perfect vegan is a dead one. I do as much vegan as I can, and after that I don't stress about it.

The bee thing is near and dear to my heart, however. For the last four years I have been growing quite a bit of my own produce organically. The first year my yield was not what it should have been. I.E., in a pumpkin patch with twenty HUGE plants, I got four pumpkins total. Lots of flowers; no fruit. This continued with my other crops. I was flummoxed.

I talked to several other organic gardeners in my area, and two nurseries, and got the same response from everyone; the european bee population has been dwindling for years. (Africanized, or 'killer', honeybees are NOT good for use in agricultural pollination. They're too aggressive, and less productive.) There aren't enough beekeepers, and there aren't enough places for bees to hive naturally, so we have a serious lack of pollinators. I was a bit more successful the next year attracting hoverflies by planting sweet alyssum, but even that was touch and go. I attracted ant colonies to my zucchini plot by literally making a trail of breadcurmbs...they were partially successful at pollination there.

I finally had to start pollinating my plants by hand. (Think...Barry White music, subdued filtered sunlight, I wear my slinkiest gardening skirt... ;) ) I spent ages going from plant to plant with clean q-tips, taking care not to cross pollinate the wrong things. I had fantastic yields that year.

Last year I did not have the time to do that as much, and my yields decreased somewhat. So I have made a conscious decision to support local beekeepers, and buy local honey, to keep them in the area. I'm hoping that if the area is more viable economically, more keepers will stay and increase their hives.

We have to eat something. And if the european been population decreases too much more, we're going to be in trouble.

Are you saying you can only eat honey?
I still don't see a valid reason there to exploit others. The only reason I can think of is pleasure. You eat it because you like it. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine it being okay to take something that someone spent alot of time making, without consent. And thanking the bees doesn't help any more than thanking a person before you rob their house.

(Note: this is just my opinion, so I'm not trying to offend you or anything, and despite what I think of honey consumption I do not think you're an immoral person. Just trying to prevent any misunderstanding; I get that alot, lol.)

On the question of pollination, which some people have raised:
If bees were not commercially raised on industrialized bee farms, the non-commercial bees would still pollinate orchards, plants, flowers, etc. I don't think vegans would even have a problem with people building artificial bee hives to give bees a place to live near orchards. The problem is thinking of bees as something we can manipulate for our own use, like a machine. We're not supposed to think of animals that way.


The difficulty here is it would require an entirely different management of all orchards, all would have to be organic. Which I support! But to be consistent, vegans probably should only buy organic fruit....

http://satyamag.com/sept05/greger.html
http://www.veganoutreach.org/starterpack/qa.html#insects

I ate honey as a vegan, and as a vegetarian.

Hmm...I never cared for the arguments about pain, consciousness, emotional lives, intelligent thinking, etc. I mean, I think they're a great *start* down the path of veganism. (Maybe a person will first become veg*n because they don't like the horror of animal slaughter, and the person feels bad about putting animals through torture, etc.) But I think our 'vegan' mindset evolves beyond this stage. If we get stuck at this level, then we can make arguments to eat all sorts of animals, since they lack (according to our criteria) the ability to feel pain, to have rich emotional lives, to think, to have consciosuness.

Again, there's a very basic way to look at this: the honey belongs to the bees. It's theirs. We can't just take it.

Well, we might think, they don't *care* that we take the honey (in the sense that they don't get philosophical about it, or feel they've been 'wronged', or weep over it). But that's not the point. They made that honey, it belongs to them, and I have no right to assume that I can take it for my own use.

On the question of pollinating crops again: I still think it would be possible for humans to build bee houses near orchards, to attract bees to the area, without turning it into a harvest procedure. (Think of people who build bat houses on their property to attract bats, or bird houses to attract birds, or certain flowers to attract insects/birds.) I am no bee expert, but I don't think we'd have to harvest the honey in order to give the bees places to live.

Imagine, then if 'beekeepers' were just people who took care of bee houses and their residents, without stripping the bees of the products of their labor. (I understand that constructed beehives do require some human intervention - to prevent cockroach infestations, etc. But I think it would be okay to do this - even if it might possibly harm the bees - if the goal was to protect the bee colony and its residence, not to harvest the honey.)

Look at it this way: just because we need bees to pollinate our crops doesn't mean we should eat the bees' product. I mean, I agree that we need bees. And it might even be helpful to encourage growth among certain species of bees. But eating honey doesn't accomplish either of those two goals.

Let me also say, I understand some vegans don't give a hoot about the honey issue. I, personally, do not care for insects. I do not bring them home for dinner, or cuddle up with up on a rainy afternoon. I would be quite content to never have an insect show up in my home ever again. I feel the same about other animals, too, like snakes. But that doesn't give me the right to just trample all over them, or take what is righfully theirs.

Again, I feel part of the problem is that we just think of insects in general, and bees in particular, as miniature machines. All they do it flit around and make honey, and honey taste so d**n good, we should just eat it, right? But maybe lemon meringue pie with whipped egg white meringue tastes really good too, so we should just go ahead and eat eggs. NO. We don't think that way.

And yet another way to look at this problem - we do not NEED honey to survive. There are other foods we can use in its place. (Sure, maybe nothing is a perfect subsitute for honey, but nothing plant-based is a perfect subsitute for angus steak either - but we still don't eat steak!)

When we make decisions about eating honey, we should look at it this way: We have several arguments here against eating honey. In order to justify eating it, we have to come up with several arguments FOR eating honey. (I'll leave that to someone else.) Our reasons FOR eating honey can't just be that it tastes good, bees make it anyway, they don't get hurt in the process, they don't cry over it, they don't think about us stealing their product, etc. If we, as vegans, are going to say that it's okay to eat this one animal product, then we better have a fully developed argument about why bees are going to be the exception to our 'no animal products' rule.

One last thought - I have never claimed to be a perfect vegan. I am addressing the honey issue on a broad philoosphical basis here. I know we're not perfect. But that also is not an arugment for eating honey. We can still strive to be better people, even if we don't live perfectly. (And who does?) But we shouldn't say: well, nobody's perfect, so it's not a big deal if I eat honey. Again, that's not a developed argument for eating honey. And since vegans stand for the idea of not eating animals or their prodcuts, if we decide to make an exception, we better have good reasons for it - not just excuses.

Just to clarify...I didn't say you claimed to be a perfect vegan...I was just stating that as a supporting thought to the fact that no matter what we do, we all make choices that impact non-humans. We can't get around it, and we all have to decide where to draw the line.

And yes...we DO need honey to survive. Perhaps not honey itself, but the process by which it is derived. Bees are simply THE most efficient pollinators on the planet. (With the exception of my son during dandelion season. That kid can spread those suckers faster than a lawnmower. :P ) And beekeeping is fairly low impact. Have you ever seen a hive that's been ransacked by a wild animal? They aren't polite. They don't take the comb frames and then replace them with brand new frames ready for work to give the bees a headstart. They destroy the hive. Beekeepers don't. I could perhaps give in to the arguement that we could simply give the bees a place to live and thrive in our farms and leave them alone to get on with it, but the problem there is that when the hives are full, the bees slow production, which means less pollination.

This would not be a problem if it weren't for the fact that modern industrial society has drastically curtailed the habitat for wild bees. There simply isn't as much space as there used to be for them to build their homes in areas where there is an abundance of pollen providing crops. We need them more than they need us, and in order to secure their help in providing us with enough plant food, we have to provide them with housing and maintenance.

Obviously...we all have different outlooks on this subject. That's normal and healthy. Oh! And I'm not a vegan per se...I try to hew close to the tofudebeast on it, but I do eat dairy and eggs on occaision, so I consider myself O/L vegetarian.