“Do not settle for less than exactly what you want. Your heart’s desires are there for a reason. Chase them. Pursue them relentlessly. Do not lose sight of your goals.”
vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects
Honey is literally murder but go off
Prove it.
They literally puke their guts up to make your honey
I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.
Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.
Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey
they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom.
…do they think they put bees in that and spin them around until they vomit…?
bee carnival
bad and naughty bees get put into the b e e c e n t r i f u g e to extract their honey
While this is hilarious, it’s also important to remember that bees do not value individual bee-lives even vaguely similarly to how humans or other animals do. Bees are all about the hive.
For example, did you know worker bees ALWAYS work themselves to death? There’s no “retirement” or anything. They just keep working until they die. One of the first jobs for newly hatched bees is rolling dead bees out of the hive.
Did you know that worker bees’ stingers are a modifier part of their reproductive system? Did you know they’re attached so that when a bee stings you the barbed tip gets caught in your skin and rips out all of their internal organs? Did you know that bees are more than willing to sting you because they fight and die for their hive?
Did you know that drone bees only mate with a queen bee once, and then they immediately die? Did you know when winter comes, the worker bees push 100% of the drones out of the hive so they starve to death?
Did you know when a queen bee emerges from her lil pod, the very first thing she does is stab all the other potential queens so they don’t have a chance to usurp her? Did you know if two queens hatch at once they have to fight to the death until there is only one? Did you know if you purchase a new queen for a hive without one, she travels with a small escort of worker bees who are all promptly killed when they arrive at the new hive, even if the queen is accepted?
Did you know absolutely all of this is natural for bees, and human intervention for honey collection is actually extremely helpful because farmers offer protection from the real threats, like hive beetles, wasps, ants, and the general chaos and misery that seems to befall a lot of hives?
Like, I mcfreaking love bees, but you have GOT to stop thinking of them the way you think of people or dogs or even cows and sheep. Bees are on a completely different level.
With any hive-based creature (bees, ants, termites, mole rats, etc) you cannot think of one animal as an individual. The organism is the hive, and each individual within that is less like a person and more like an organ, or even a cell. The queen is not a leader, she’s a reproductive system. They don’t even think individually; a single ant or termite is unbelievably stupid, dumber than a roomba, but a hive together is capable of incredible feats of engineering and tactics because they treat the brain of each member like a human treats each of their individual neurons.
An individual bee has no say in whether their honey is used to feed the young of their hive or sold to humans, but an individual bee has no say in anything. The hive has decided that living in the human-box and giving them honey is a better deal than living out in the woods, because the human-box is clean and sturdy and guarded by a horrifying lumbering titan which will smite the enemies of the hive.
Can I just say I love the line “The hive has decided that living in the human-box and giving them honey is a better deal than living out in the woods, because the human-box is clean and sturdy and guarded by a horrifying lumbering titan which will smite the enemies of the hive.“? Like, as this gestalt entity it decides that yes, the big weird thing that is giving us free room and board and brings down the wrath of of thousands of us on our enemies is a good friend to have, expecially if all it wants is the honey.
