To Bee ...or not to Bee

[Oystein]

The only vegan I’ve known made an exception for honey, partly because of them fertilizing so many vegetables, etc, and that they produce more than they need. The vegan husband of another acquaintance wouldn’t eat candy corn because it’s made with honey, but I suspected he just didn’t like candy corn.

Why not ask a vegan?
I am a vegan!
Well, I am mire like a 70% vegan: I am vegan at home, and when I eat elsewhere (which happenes a lot), I compromise.

That is because there are several different reasons to eat vegan: My reason is sustainable food production - in particular, the insane land use, biomass and methane production of cattle, and the (somewhat lesser) direct impact that other for-food animals have, and of course the fact that feeding plant food to animals and then eating the animals is very inefficient use of farming and plants.

I am NOT a "be nice to animals" vegan, though. While of course we ought to be "nice" to mammals even if we are going to kill and eat them eventually, I can construct no consistent argument for why killing or enslaving animals ought to be forbidden. There is certainly no law in "nature" that says so, as nature is one big mess of a massacre, and couldn't be otherwise.

So where do bees (and honey and wax) fit in here?
Well, while I haven't researched yet the environmental impact of honey and wax production, particularly its CO2 intensity, it seems clear that these are niche products in the grand theme of providing humans with calories and useful materials, and long before I turn to "what about bees", reducing cattle populations will remain a far mor pressing priority for a long time to come.
Bees proooobably are somewhat energy / CO2 intensive - they need to fly considerable distances to collect their raw materials and then need some more energy to convert them to end products.
But they use up practically no extra land.
So, personally, well, I currently don't have honey in my household, but if my best friend comes visiting and proposes we make a stack of pancakes just like old times, I'll probaby buy some honey, because it beats maple syrop my a country mile!

HOWEVER!!!!
Honey bees are just one species among a wide variety of bees - they are the domexticable and domesticated species, certainly bred to some extent, too, they make particularly large hives, large enough to make collection of honey and wax economically viable, and bee-keepers have an interest in their domesticated bees monopolizing flowers in the area.
And so, because of this, in many inhabited areas, cultivated honey bees far outnumber and out-pollinate wild bees.
Resulting in near-monocultures.
And it seems to me that THAT is one of the reasons why a desease like this mite can spread so widely.

So, your vegan friend who likes commercial honey from cultivated, domesticated honey bees is ill informed: Nature, nor even those of our crops that depend on bees for pollination, doesn't need no kept bee-hives. Without commercial honey bees, there'd easily be enough wild bees to do the job. And in an environment where there are plenty of different bee species, some or many of which preferring certain flowers that the others maybe shun, diseases are unlikely to spread universally, and unlikly to threaten food supply.

 

[Lithrael]

Yeah! And you are spot on in that a big part of why varroa destructor is such a big problem is that the exact variety of bee that's extra vulnerable to it is the big popular one.

 

[dudalb]

And then are Beekeepers like the one in the movie..............

The Hive Must Be Protected......