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16 oz of honey requires 1152 bees to travel 112,000 miles and visit 4.5 million flowers.

Most of the honey we get at supermarkets and stores don’t come from natural hives. 

Honey is an animal product, produced when bees digest nectar they have collected and then regurgitate it. It is an animal product, just like an egg or milk. Yes, a bee is an insect and not technically considered an animal by many people, but a bee’s body changes the composition of what it ingests, just like other animals.However, there is another reason vegans won’t eat honey, and that is because it is harmful to another living creature. According to Daniel Hammer, bees do experience pain and suffering while they are being exploited for their products (not just honey but also beeswax, royal jelly, and more). There is simply no way beekeepers, humane or otherwise, can avoid harming or killing bees while they are extracting the bees’ products. Many vegans choose their lifestyle because they wish to avoid harming any other creature, and so they choose not to eat honey.

Check out this couple of articles that are pretty complete about everything around this topic :) 

Why Honey is Not Vegan?

As a vegan, you depend upon beekeeping. It doesn’t matter if you never use beeswax or eat honey. You still depend on beekeeping. It is absolutely impossible not to. 

Because here’s the secret; you know all those delicious fruits and vegetables you eat? You wouldn’t have them if it wasn’t for bees, and here’s another secret; those bees were probably either kept by the farmer who grew them for the purpose of pollinating his/her crops, or moved to the farm during pollination season by a beekeeper. 

If you’ve ever eaten a cherry, almond, blueberry, tomato, melon, squash, raspberry, strawberry…hell, most fruits or veggies…you’ve benefited from beekeeping. There is simply no way to avoid it. If you leave it up to whatever pollinators happen to stop in from the surrounding area, your yields will suffer dramatically, which means less produce and less money for the farmer. Therefore, the easy and universally preferred method is to plop a few hives on the property. The girls will make sure that just about every last almond/cherry/blueberry flower is pollinated (They’re VERY good at what they do) and you can happily harvest a bumper crop. This is a universally used practice among food producers. 

And do you know the best way to help make sure the bees survive?

Keep them. Organically, without using any chemicals. And here’s a secret about beekeeping; you inspect the hives whether or not you take honey, to make sure the bees are healthy and doing well. (There are mites and diseases that can severely harm bees, and even as an organic beekeeper who doesn’t use chemicals on her girls there are methods I use to prevent/treat things like varroa mite infestation that can kill an otherwise healthy hive).

And yes, when you open a hive to inspect it, you might crush one or two bees. But tell me, honestly, that you’ve never killed an insect. Bees themselves will kill sick/non productive members of the hive to ensure the health of the hive as a whole; I don’t see how my accidentally squishing one to ensure the health of the other 50,000 is any different. 

And this is what all beekeepers do. And if you, as before mentioned, ever eat anything that isn’t grain-based, this is what took place to put that food on your plate. 

I would also like to point out that bees will store as much honey as they possibly can…which usually ends up being waaaaay more than they actually can use. To survive a log Iowa winter, my bees need about 100 lbs of honey per hive. Well, last year one hive had TWICE that. (I took 50 pounds, leaving them MORE than enough to get through the winter. I just checked on them today; they’re alive and healthy). 

You are NOT hurting them by taking a little honey for yourself, no more than you already are by looking in on them every two or three weeks to make sure they’re healthy. 

And again, if you ever eat any fruits or veggies, SOMEONE IS ALREADY KEEPING BEES TO POLLINATE THEM AND INSPECTING THEM TO MAKE SURE THEY’RE HAPPY AND HEALTHY. 

KEEPING BEES IS NOT WHAT IS KILLING BEES IT IS WHAT IS SAVING BEES. 

WITHOUT BEES YOUR VEGAN DIET IS IMPOSSIBLE.

WITHOUT THAT “EVIL” EXPLOITATION OF BEES YOUR VEGAN DIET IS IMPOSSIBLE. 

AGAIN, BEEKEEPING IS WHAT IS SAVING BEES NOT KILLING THEM. 

SO IF YOU EAT A LITTLE HONEY IT IS HONESTLY NO WORSE THAN EATING SOME ALMONDS AND FRUIT SALAD. 

Yes. You can keep bees without taking honey from them. But, as I said before, you’re ALREADY in the hive checking for diseases and pests. That, if anything, is what causes bees stress, not you taking a frame or two of honey (each frame of honey can hold 15 pounds!). 

Also, there’s a REASON you take honey from bees, not just because you want to eat it. 

See, like I said before, bees will store as much honey as they can. It’s instinctive. However, there’s only so much room in a hive to put stuff, and honey isn’t the only thing in a hive. They also need room to raise brood, store pollen, ect. Now, if they run out of room, they’ll start feeling overcrowded, which will trigger swarming activity. You can, of course, add more supers (boxes) to the hive, but there’s a limit on how many workers one queen can produce, and you don’t want more supers than they can police, even if all of them are stuffed full of honey. That way lies pests and raiding. So, what we want to do is make sure that they don’t feel overcrowded, while making sure that they don’t have more room than they can take care of. 

When bees feel overcrowded, they swarm. When they swarm, they raise a new queen. The old queen and half the bees will then leave to try and find someplace to start a new hive. 90% of swarms die. As a beekeeper, you don’t want this. 

You can, of course, purposefully let them start raising a new queen and then split a new hive off of the old one if you want to. I’ve done this myself. But this is not always desirable, for many reasons (no more room for more hives, can’t take care of more, don’t have a spare hive body on hand, ect.) There’s also the fact that a recently swarmed hive is susceptible to raiding by wasps/skunks (skunks LOVE to raid hives, the little bastards) or mice, as half the bees that would have defended it before are now gone. You don’t want this either; raiding can kill a hive as quick as disease or pests. (This is why I keep a VERY close eye on any hives that I’ve recently split, and have taken potshots at skunks in the backyard with a slingshot before. Not to kill them, just to scare them off.)

If you don’t want them to swarm, the easiest way to keep them from feeling cramped and give them a little new breathing room is to pull a few surplus honey frames they’ve filled up and replace them with empty frames. The girls will then happily go back to work filling the new empty frames with honey or brood or whatever they decide needs to go in all that new space. They don’t feel crowded any longer, the hive doesn’t swarm and stays strong, everyone’s happy. 

And what, then, am I supposed to do with these three frames of honey I pulled? Throw them away? Hell no. That’s 30-40 pounds of delicious, right there. 

Humans and bees have what’s called a symbiotic relationship. We both benefit from the arrangement. Don’t diss things if you don’t understand how they work. 

And, one more time…keeping bees is necessary for your vegan diet to remain viable. A beekeeper is going to inspect all of those hives anyway, which is the most stressful part of beekeeping for the bees. You are, with your eating habits, (and by that I mean ‘really just eating’, because there’s NO diet that doesn’t rely on beekeeping) reliant on this practice. Taking a frame or two of honey is the LEAST stressful part of inspecting a hive for the bees. 

They do not kill native pollinators.

The studies that have been done that show that there are fewer native pollinators around is when you have massive agricultural operations, and you truck thousands of hives out there to pollinate the crops.

If we all think real hard, we can probably think of a reason that there are fewer native bees on massive monocultres of crops maintained with commercial pesticides and herbicides.

This study has made a lot of people think this, but it is, quite honestly, people misinterpreting the study results of a study that only focused on a very specific set of conditions that are not representative of most beekeepers.

In other situations, honeybees and native bees live right alongside each other perfectly happily. A flower doesn’t just produce nectar once and that’s it; they continually produce it as long as they’re blooming, and multiple bees can and do visit the same individual flowers and feed from them.

I’ve got thousands of native bees in my backyard, right alongside my hives of honeybees. There’s feral honeybee hives around here, and right next to them are mason bee nests and bumblebee burrows. They all get along just fine.

In addition, there are certain species of flowers that only bumblebees or other native bees can feed from, and honeybees don’t touch.

US gov’t: hmmm… that’s not good. You should stop having that problem.

folks: I mean I’d like to, but I could use some help.

US gov’t: Hmmmm. What if we make the problem illegal?

folks: Well, that’s –

US gov’t: The problem is illegal! Stop having it!

folks: I’d really like to but –

Why do we say that capitalism must be “dismantled”?

You’ll hear phrases like “Smash the state!” “Eat the rich!” and “Smash capitalism!”

And, yes, of course, but… :)

However relevant those sayings are, our work must be careful, highly organized and above all planned.

Because capitalism and all of its associated systems are not discrete, abstracted entities we can attack independently.

It is a structure, like a complicated machine with many thousands of working parts…

And right now it is connected to absolutely everything.

If we do this… [picks up huge hammer and smashes the machine]

Then a lot of vulnerable people will die.

The machine was built and improved and redesigned and patched over the course of generations. It is very good at its intended purpose, which is ultimately to generate profit.

Every human being alive today relies on the byproducts of the machine to survive, without exception.

The machine’s engineers want it to keep working like it does. In fact, they want to optimise it.

That will kill all remaining life on Earth.

So, we must destroy the machine, quickly and carefully

We must examine its deadly programs and mechanics and replace them with alternatives we built together.

The engineers don’t want us tampering with the machine.

However, we make it run…

So we can make it STOP. Together.

How will YOU help us to safely dismantle the machine?

iww.org

Please spread the word - these people are NOT legitimate. They are neonazis trying to divide the LGBTQ+ community.

Don't give them attention, even the time of day.

It's what they want you to do.

Share the screenshots. Spread the truth. If we give them attention, they win.

TRIGGER WARNING - below the cut: n word, f slur, r slur, trans slurs, nazis, probably more.

“The plan was to grow our money so we could feel financially secure enough to have a baby.”

This is a couple that’s already worth three million dollars. They own their own home. They have a passive monthly income of $12.5k without lifting a single finger, and he can make $30k/mo working for 60 hours. To put that in normal 40-hour weeks, this means that he works until mid-May, takes the rest of the year off, and makes five hundred and sixty thousand dollars for his trouble, on top of the three million they already have and any income she might have.

tl;dr: That’s a lot of fucking money for very little effort.

And these people are scared. They think that thisisn’t enough money for them to raise a child

Boss made a dollar

I made a dime,

That was a poem

From a simpler time.

Now boss makes a thousand

And gives us a cent

While he’s got employees 

Who can’t pay the rent.

So when boss makes a million

And the workers make jack

Then that’s when we riot

And take our lives back.

Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read.

I would like to have a product that was available for three easy payments and one fuckin’ complicated payment. We can’t tell you which payment it is, but one of these payments is gonna be a bitch! The mailman will get shot to death, the envelope will not seal, and the stamp will be in the wrong denomination! Good luck, fucker! That last payment must be made in wampum!

One time, this guy handed me a picture of him, he said “Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.” Every picture is of you when you were younger. “Here’s a picture of me when I’m older.” “You son-of-a-bitch! How’d you pull that off? Lemme see that camera… What’s it look like? ”

An escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. You would never see an “Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order” sign, just “Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.

I play golf. I’m not good at golf, I never got good. I never got a hole-in-one. But I did hit a guy. And that’s way more satisfying. You’re supposed to yell “Fore!” but I was too busying mumbling “There ain’t no way that’s gonna hit him.”

- “Tennis is depressing because no matter how good you get, you will never be as good as a wall”

Like if you say you’re bi but you’ve only dated people of the opposite gender? you’re bi as hell i don’t care.

If you tell me you’re trans but you haven’t transitioned yet or don’t want to undergo certain aspects of transitioning? you are trans! I’m gonna call you by the name and pronouns you tell me to use

what if someone looks feminine, is afab, and uses she/her pronouns but identifies as nonbinary? what if someone looks masculine, is amab, and uses he/him pronouns but identifies as nonbinary? both of those people are nonbinary because they said they are!

if you’re asexual or aromantic but you’re still hetero in the sense that you experience attraction of some sort to the opposite gender and that gender alone? you’re still a part of the community babe! Aros and aces have always been queer.

If you don’t know if you’re queer or not? you’re certainly welcome to be a part of our spaces while you figure it out!

if you don’t wanna use labels? dont! that’s it! never let anyone pressure you into labels if you’re not ready to define that part of yourself.

if you use labels/pronouns that are uncommon and/or perceived as strange? that’s your label! those are your pronouns! who am i to tell you you can’t use those words to describe yourself??

People are going to judge you if you fit the mould and if you don’t, including grown women who should really know better.