this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] Kyle_The_G 93 points 3 months ago (95 children)

I feel like bees are a bit of a grey area. We're not eating them, we're kind of like landlords that give them a nice place to stay and they pay rent in honey. I'm not vegan so I'm not quite sure what the rationale is for bee stuff.

[–] chuckleslord 25 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Couple of reasons. One, honey is made not from local pollinators but from European honey bees. Two, European honey bees are really good at producing honey, which means they're more efficient at removing pollen and nectar from flowers, denying food for native pollinators. Three, while only a few bees are directly harmed during honey harvesting, the need for their honey to be harvested means that they've been bred to make big, uniform honeycombs and a glut of excess honey. This makes them more susceptible to diseases, even before you factor in the monoculture nature of their existence.

Essentially, it's not that eating honey is harmful to bees. It's that the creation of honey at scale is cruel both to the bees producing the honey and the native pollinators who get pushed out by them. We (my household) do have honey on occasion, but only from local, small scale honey producers.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Here in Brazil we have Meliponiculture, farming honey from native stingless bees.

[–] littlewonder 2 points 3 months ago
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