Sonntag, 20. Januar 2013

The bees and the birds...or something similiar..

So people ask why certain bee products are not vegan or do not fit with a vegan lifestyle...

Because, well..bees are just insects and honey is plant based and so on.

Let us start with honey



If honey is vegan because it´s source is a flower, than cow milk would be vegan because it was once grass.


Bees drink from flowers, put the nectar in their stomach, predigest it, put enzymes in it, vomit it back up and give it to the next bee.
After some dozen times of eating and revomiting it, thickening the nectar and changing it with their predigestion into honey it is stored.

Some honey is not directly from flowers, it is the sugary shit from insects which the bees collect from the plants on which those insects sit and sip plant juice like mosquitos sip blood.




And because there is so much sugar in there, they can not use it all, shitting it out and bees and also ants collect the shit.

Bees turn shit into honey, the dark clear kind that is marketed as 'forest honey'.


Pollen  and beebread



Pollen is also collected from flowers and some trees..it is hard work to collect so much.

How is pollen won, because the bees will surely not just drop their hard earned protein rich food into a can for the humans to collect?

Well, you make the entrance to the hive too small for the bees to get into, so they loose the big packages of pollen they carry.

Beebread is fermented pollen, literarelly bread for the bees that needed time and effort to be made.

It is collected from the hive.


Gelee Royale




Gelee Royale is the juice that makes queens...literarelly.

To win the juice you need to put the hive in mortal danger, at least, the bees see it that way.
They get massively stressed.

So you take the queen and make them believe they will all die, so they put the worker larvaes into queen cells where they are feed with Queen juice.

Than when the cells are full you cut out the big cells with the larvaes and empty them.
The larvaes are killed, the juice collected.

It is an extremly hard, stressfull time for the hive and bee farmers who at least don´t want to buy new hives each year and care a bit for their bees, do  not collect Queenjuice.


Wax


So what you might say, wax is sweated out by the bees and they use it to build up their hive.

Producing wax costs energy and the bees have to eat a lot of fuel to produce wax.

The farmers want clean, new wax, so instead of beeing able to use the same cells for years, the farmers take a couple of times a year the wax plates  with fully built cells and melts them down, giving the bees back single plates where the bees built back their cells.

For one pound wax, the bees need to eat 6 pounds honey.
Normally they would reuse the same cells again and again until they are old and dirty, but that would be more work for the farmer and less wax.

Bees, like other animals are preserving energy, they would not built so much wax into the hive if the farmer wouldn´t take it away every other time.


Bee poison


Bee poison is collected for cosmeticas and medicinal use.

To collect it the bee farmer puts and electrical wire in front of the entrance so the bees are shocked and loose the poison.
Some bees also die than.

Bees also preserve their poison, they only use it when absolutely neccessary and producing the poison also needs energy...logically.

Propolis

Propolis is medicine, bee antibiotic, used to preserve pollen,make bee bread, cement the corners of the hive and make it antibacterial so no germs can thrive in the wonderfully warm and moist hive.

Without propolis the bees would easily catch funghus, germs and die.

Mice who die in the hive are preserved and wholly coated with Propolis so they do not rot and infect the hive.

Propolis is won by putting a frame into the hive on which the bees coat all edges and splits with propolis.

I do not need to tell you that collecting the stuff needed for Propolis and the production of it, is extremly hard work and time consuming?



And why is it so bad to use bee products?



Well let me paint you a scenario where you can dive into the hivemind...


Imagine yourself with a nice house, a garden, making all the good, organic food yourself, having wonderfull children, a loving husband and top notch health care..


Now someone is blowing fumes into your house, making you think the house is burning..

You and your family flee.

You come back and all your lovely homemade food is gone and in your storage room is only white toast bread and lemonade.-> honey and pollen.

To top it off someone stole your doors and furniture and you need to buy new and even built some of your own.(wax is taken)

Even the walls are damaged and rain and draft is getting into your home. Not to forget the health care you worked so hard for and paid good money is now subsituted with toxic chemicals(Propolis taken)


It doesn´t stop, it happens again and again.

And than some day your partner is gone and with him one of your kids. (the male bees who act as babysitter, feeder and heater are killed because they do not produce honey, the queen larvaes killed for Gelee royale)


Bee farmers...

- Take the food and substitute sugar water and soy flour instead of pollen and honey.
This will lower the health of the hive because those substitutes are never like the real thing.

Farmers will say that bees produce 'much more than needed' but bees never produce too much.
They use up all their storage that isn´t eaten during winter. Either for rainy, cold days, or for the hive to swarm.

Happy bees swarm, bees that fear starvation stay in one hive!


Bee farmers say  that if the bees were not happy they could just fly away, but the opposite is true.
Happy bees will swarm and send a queen with half of the honey and workers away.

The farmer steals honey and kills males and queen larvaes to keep the bees in fear of starvation so they collect honey instead of  producing a new hive.


-Male bees are killed because they do not produce honey.
But male bees feed the larvaes, help in the hive and keep the temperature and humidity on a good level.
Male bees are homeworkers.

Male bees have their purpose in a hive, but for the farmer they are a nuisance.
The male larvae cells are bigger, so the farmer can see where the male larvaes are kept and he cuts the cells away, slicing the larvaes in half or putting them in the garbage.


Because food like honey, pollen and the Porpolis are taken, the health of the bees declines and they get ill easily.
The toxic chemicals  are also weakening the bees, reinfection made easy.

Because many farmers do not want to have the hassle with treating the bees and having to be careful because of residues in bee products, ill hives are burned.

The whole hive is plugged so no bee gets away, gasoline and..there you go ..

For big farmers it is cheaper to kill the complete hive off and buy a new one.

Many hives also die when the farmer miscalculates the ammount of honey which the bees need to survive the winter.
The bees starve because the farmer took too much of the so called overproduction...


But what about bees beeing needed for pollination?
Without bees no fruits and such stuff..?

There are 20.000 fucking bee species on this planet!

The honey bee is only one of them and this species is hyped as the master blaster because humans get wax and honey from them.



And not only bees pollinate, there are also butterflies, bumble bees, flies, even mammaels!

Honey bees are bad pollinatores compared to other insects.
But because they act as a whole hive and plundering everything in sight, they can pollinate farmed fruits and vegetables very well.

In reality honey bees are also  the reason why rare insects and plants die out.

Many rare plants need their special pollinator..only one species of insects can successfully pollinate them.


But like a swarm of locusts, the honey bees graze away all the food and the pollinatores starve while the rare plant blooms only on a special time while the pollinator feeds on other plants.

Honey bees can graze over miles and empty off all food sources for wild insects.


Rare insects may starve, or catch an illness from the health impaires, malnutritioned honey bees.

It even goes so far that honey bees take the nectar from rare plants and leave nothing for their special pollinatore while failing to pollinate the plant.


If the honey bees would die out, nature would not care, there are thousands of other pollinatores who would do a better job.

The hype with "We all die when there are no honey bees" is man made hystery, but no wonder when humans kill of all pollinatores with insecticides sprayed generously on the fields.

Honey bees are  not longer the natural, wild species they once were.

They are a breed, engineered species just like the holstein cow is not an Ur and can not go back to bee-ing one.

The european honey bee is now imported all over the world and just like farm breed cows, endangering the polinatores that are native to those countries.
There are eight honey bee species who build up a hive like the european honey bee, but none of them are used widely like this one.

The bee industry is worth circa 200 billion  dollars.

It is a industry just like dairy farming

Honey bees may pollinate the farmed plant species, but many wild plants and the pollinatores who need those to live, suffer because of bee farming.

The want of special honey that is only produced by some wild bees, takes said wild honey bee species to near extinction because the collectors destroy the hive to take all the honey away.


One might argue that it isn´t so bad and bees have not the ability to suffer like cows and so on..

Still it is an industry that thrives on abuse and mistreatment of animals, endagering wild life.

Honey bees are as unneccessary as Holstein cows in the Sahara and honey is not a magic juice that cures all your aliments.
It is just another way to make money for the greedy industry without having to keep an eye on mother nature.

Why keep nature intact for wild pollinatores when you have the honey bee?