18/02/2020
So our topic this week is HONEY BEES AND HONEYS. We know our main focus is on the well being of cats and dogs but we all love honey and deserve to know how our honey is made.
Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their role in pollination and for producing honey and beeswax. In a bee hive colony, are three types of bees which are queen, drone and the workers. Each colony has only one queen who's job is to lay eggs and preside over the hive. During her lifetime, the queen bee only mates once but as she does, she mates with several drones at that time. Queens are developed from larvae selected by worker bees and specially fed royal jelly in order to become sexually mature to replace the former queen bee.
Worker bees are female but are not capable of reproducing. They do all the work in the hive, and they control most of what goes on inside. Their jobs include housekeeping, feeding the queen, drones and larvae, collecting the pollen and nectar, and making the wax whilst; A drone is a male honey bee whom unlike the queen and female worker bees, do not have stingers and gather neither nectar nor pollen. A drone's primary role is to mate with an unfertilized queen.
Now let's discuss about honeys and bee farming. There is a common misconception that honey, aka bee vomit, is vegan-friendly, but is it? Honey, beeswax, bee pollen, royal jelly (bee milk), propolis, and bee venom - are all products of intensive labor from hardworking animals.
Bees feed on pollen, but honey is their single source of food during poorer weather and winter months, which contains essential nutrients intended for them. In order to fill their stomachs, honey bees will visit up to 1,500 flowers to collect enough nectar. When returning to the hive, the bee, along with other 'house bees', will regurgitate and chew the nectar, in a process that results in honey. Each bee produces just a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in his/her lifetime - and every ounce is fundamental to the hive.
In a bee farm, usually these bees undergo cruelty by beekeepers/ farmers. Some of these cruelties are :
1) in a hive inside the bee farm, Beekepers clip the queen bees' wings to prevent them from leaving the hive and producing a new colony elsewhere - which would slash productivity and profit. Queen bees are also often artificially inseminated
2) Farmers are known to replace the honey they remove from a hive with a sugar substitute, which is substantially worse for the bees' health. The cheap sugar replacer lacks the nutrients, fats, and vitamins that honey has. This unethical practice prompts the worker bees to overwork themselves in order to replace the honey they have lost.
3) during the honey removal process, many bees die after stinging the farmers
4) farmers destroy the entire hive after harvesting all the honey in order to keep the cost low. During this process, many bees are injured as they try to escape, they are either killed or have their wings and legs torn apart
5) honey bees are bred in order to increase population and this can lead to high die-offs and diseases associated with stress, pesticide poisoning, inadequate forage and poor nutrition. These diseases can easily spread to other pollinators that we and the other animals rely on. Due to mass breeding of honey bees, there has been a decline in native bumblebee and various bird species world wide.
Honey is definitely not vegan and bees do not deserve to be exploited, they deserve to keep the reward to their hardwork. We have no right to burn down or destroy their colony for just a little bit of sweetness.
