No they don't, we steal honey from them,
and it's not "symbiotic" thing as some want us to think. The whole "without us bees will die" argument is wrong, because bees literally die because of us.
Einstein once said: “If bees ever die out, mankind will have only
four years left to live”. In the past five years, billions of honeybees
simply vanished for reasons still obscure. If the bees keep dying, it
will have drastic effects for humans as well: more than one third of our
food production depends on pollination by honeybees and their life and
death are linked to ours.
Life without the bee is unthinkable. But, between pesticides,
antibiotics and monoculture, the queens and their workers are losing
their power.
MORE THAN HONEY, a documentary by the Swiss filmmaker Marcus
Imhoof, is looking into the fascinating world of bees, showing small
family beekeepers (including the beekeeper of ERSTE Foundation beehive,
Heidrun Singer) and industrialized honey farms. MORE THAN HONEY is a
film on the relationship between mankind and honeybees, about nature and
about our future. Honeybees show us that stability is just as unhealthy
as unlimited growth, that crises and disasters are triggering evolution
and that salvation sometimes comes from a completely unexpected
direction.
Image courtesy of
Per-Olof
Gustafsson
Other products that come from the honey
industry are:
- Bee pollen: pollen collected by
bees; their primary source of nutrition.
- Royal jelly (bee milk): the
pharyngeal gland secretions of the nurse bees. The queen larvae
receives more of the royal jelly than the worker larvae, growing her
into a queen bee.
- Beeswax: secreted by bees to help
build their hives.
- Propolis: a brownish resinous
material of waxy consistency collected by bees from the buds of trees
and used as a cement and an antiseptic.
- Bee venom: obtained from a bee
sting. Honeybees die after stinging someone.
Bees gather pollen in sacs
and nectar from the flowers. Honey is stored in the hive as winter food
for the bees .
Yes, sometimes they make more than they can eat, but do the beekeepers
only take the extra? No,
according to James E. Tew, an Extension Specialist in Apiculture at
Ohio
State University in Wooster, "Commercial beekeepers frequently extract
[steal]
all fall-season honey and then feed colonies either sugar syrup or corn
syrup in quantities great enough to provide all the winter food the
bees
would need"
The simplest reason why honey isn't vegan is by definition.
The term vegan was coined by Donald Watson in 1944 and was defined as
follows:
Veganism is a way of living which excludes all forms
of exploitation of, and cruelty to, the animal kingdom, and includes a
reverence for life. It applies to the practice of living on the
products of the plant kingdom to the exclusion of flesh, fish, fowl,
eggs, honey, animal milk and its derivatives, and encourages the use of
alternatives for all commodities derived wholly or in part from animals.
When you eat a
vegetable or piece of fruit, chances are there is a honeybee to thank
for the opportunity. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 25
percent of our diet is the result of pollination by the insect. The
recent discovery of a rapid and widespread decline of honeybee
populations has scientists mystified and very concerned
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