Myth # 53 : " But eating honey doesn ' t harm anybody ."
Myth # 53 : " But eating honey doesn ' t harm anybody ."
This myth is admittedly a tough one for most folks to discard , and indeed honey was one of the last animal-based foods I stopped eating before finally going vegan . After all , I thought at the time , we humans aren ' t slaughtering bees to eat them ; we are only eating their excess honey – honey that they calmly & willingly give us . Ahhh , if only this were true ... Of course , it isn ’ t . Please consider the following little-known facts :
* Fact : Even though we have been taught that bees are " only insects ", James Gould ( professor of ecology at Princeton University ) and Carol Gould ( professor of evolutionary biology , also at Princeton ) noted that “ Honey bees are at the top of their part of the evolutionary tree … To look at honeybees , then , is to see one of the most elegant solutions to the challenges of life on our planet ” … Furthermore , Martin Giurfa noted in his 2001 study that bees are capable of abstract thinking and also able to distinguish their immediate family members from other bees in their hive … Fred Dyer noted ( in The Journal of Experimental Biology ) that bees use real-time visual cues to map their travels , and Judith Reinhard and her team of researchers noted in a 2004 study that – similar to the way that smells invoke powerful memories for humans – specific odors also trigger memories in bees ... Finally , and for some most importantly , independent studies done by Balderrama & Núñez both showed conclusively that bees do indeed feel pain when harmed … What all this research boils down to , my Friends , is that regardless of what you may think about their level of intelligence , bees are quite clearly much more than " only insects ". What this research collectively shows is that bees are sentient , that bees are conscious and that bees are capable of suffering when frightened , harmed &/ or killed .
* Fact : Despite what we have been taught , most honeybees are not kept in idyllic , small-farm or backyard hives , but rather are almost exclusively enslaved in far larger , far more callous operations . Indeed , as a result of pesticide-related diseases and man-caused climate shifts , the world ’ s honeybee population has been nearly decimated over the past several decades . And yet the demand for honey has remained so high that these tiny animals have become primarily factory-farmed slaves – much like chickens , pigs & cows .
* Fact : Bees are greatly harmed during the honey farming process ... First of all , even though queen bees can naturally live as long as five years , bee farmers maximize their honey production by killing their queens off and replacing them every two years ( sometimes even yearly ). These “ replacement queens ” almost invariably come from commercial queen suppliers – essentially puppy mills for bees ... In addition , many of the larger bee farmers purposefully kill off entire hives during the winter months ; murdering hundreds of thousands of healthy bees merely to maximize the subsequent honey production in newer hives ... Bee farmers also use smoke when working with their bees – which makes the bees passive by forcing them to gorge themselves on their own honey ... Also , even the most careful bee farmers end up injuring , dismembering , squashing or otherwise killing many dozens ( if not many of hundreds ) of bees in every single hive when honey is collected .
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