Comment on Are fossil fuels vegan?
radiouser@crazypeople.online 13 hours agoBees aren’t intentionally harmed or killed to make honey but it isn’t vegan.
This isn’t entirely true. Sometimes queen bees have their wings cur off to insure they stay in the beehive, and thus make the beehive produce honey. Also, the queens can then often be discarded/killed at the end of the season. So no harm being done in the production of honey is not always the case.
I feel like there should be an option to certify honey as being vegan if no harm is done to the bees in the process though.
Honey isn’t vegan because it is an animal product, and veganism seeks to avoid animal exploitation and cruelty. I think any form of taking honey from bees would be considered exploitive but that’s just my view/opinion.
There’s a fair bit of nuance around the topic of whether honey should be vegan or not, since honeybees also overproduce, and that is its own problem. Like with sheep’s wool.
Although crude oil has the additional complication where it’s an incidental post-death product, like fertiliser, and from that viewpoint, it would be about as ethical.
Spacenut@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I mean I think bees are harmed in the production of honey, it’s just that most people don’t care about bee welfare. Commercially they’re bred by crushing the male to extract semen, and any operation above hobby scale will clip the wings of the queen so that the hive can’t escape.
Then you necessarily need to replace their ideal food source with something that is nutritionally much worse for them (basically sugar water), and then hope that they survive on that long enough to make more honey for us to take.