rickyhitler:

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

rickyhitler:

This is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen. She will make a point like “honey is unhealthy” and then not back it up after that, she just says it’s unhealthy and therefore it is.
She says “beekeepers rip off the wings of bees” and then shows footage of queen bees with wings, lmao.

The main argument is “honey is bee barf”. Don’t care, I love bee barf.

Support your beekeepers, purchase honey. 🙂

Ignoring the philosophizing, here are some factual issues with this video, from a real-life beekeeper:

1. Yes, drones are killed for artificial insemination.  But they also die with every act of natural insemination.  When a drone mates with a queen, his genitalia stay with her, basically ripping him apart.  (Apparently you can hear them pop on a quiet day.)  A drone’s only purpose in life is to find a queen and mate with her – they don’t gather nectar or make honey, just go out every day looking for the ladies.  In fact, any drones left in the hive in the fall are kicked out to freeze or starve to death, as they don’t contribute anything to the hive’s survival.  So, if a drone could be said to want anything, it would be to end just like this, inseminating something.

2. Queen bees’ wings are not ripped off, they are clipped.  Not everybody does this, but the idea is to keep her from being able to swarm, so you don’t lose half your bees.  They cut them with little scissors, as you can see in the video.  Me, I don’t mess around with this, as it seems unnecessary and ineffective.  If they want to swarm, they’ll figure out a way, and it would be better to give them more space so they don’t feel they need to swarm instead of trying to mechanically prevent it.

3. “Bee vomit”.  Ok, so nectar is technically ingested and regurgitated in the process of turning it into honey.  However, bees have multiple stomachs, and the one they use for this is not the same one they use for digestion.  So the nascent honey is not combined with their half-digested food, thus not gross.  Also, insects in general and bees specifically have a totally different digestive system than mammals, so I’m not sure why it would be comparable to vomit anyway.

4. She says honey contains (the supposedly awful-with-no-need-to-explain) “sugar, animal protein, and fat”.  A quick google suggests that, as you would think, there’s not any fat in honey.  Where would it even come from? Protein content is negligible.  Is the problem that it comes from animals?  That seems obvious, given the discussion.  It is basically all sugar, though, with traces of pollen, enzymes, etc.

Support your local beekeepers indeed!  As with all agriculture, if you have concerns about a specific practice, talk to the people who grow your food, and you may find you need not worry.

Thank you for the information! I didn’t know that about the drones serving no purpose other than to mate. Very interesting.