(no subject)

[madbaker]

I have an acquaintance who is a fairly self-righteous vegan. Her latest proud declaration was that she avoids honey "because it causes bees to die."

Sometime when I feel like getting into an argument, I'm going to ask her how she justifies using plastics. After all, to create petroleum dinosaurs had to die...

Edited to add: this is no-one that you know (probably). She's outside my normal social circles. (For a reason.)

Comments

Bet you thought this thread was dead, didn't you?

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

...tried to email you, but my address for you bounced....

Y'know how one's mind turns to odd things while driving? Mine turned to your cow-orker who didn't want to eat honey "because bees die." This may well be something you'd just like to forget about, if so, go ahead and delete this email. I won't mind.

Bees don't die in honey production.

Let me back this up a bit. A couple years ago, I considered taking up beekeeping. I did a lot of reading and study. I know a fair amount (on paper) of the process. I've never had a hive of my own, though.

When it's honey season, the beekeepers put extra box-sections on top of the main hive box. These are called "supers" and it's where all the honey gets put by the bees that isn't directly used in raising the brood (larvae) of the hive. Between the main box and the supers is put a thing called a "queen excluder" which is a board with holes small enough that the workers can go through them (to deposit honey) but not the queen who wants to lay brood. She's nearly twice the size of the average worker. The queen would otherwise lay eggs in the supers. Those larvae would otherwise get killed when you harvest the honey from the supers, but with a queen excluder, there's no problem.

There's no other circumstance that I know of where bees would deliberately be killed in production of honey -- although one or two may get squished as you move things around, that hardly qualifies, since someone driving nearby could easily kill that many on the windshield. So if she wants to save bees, she shouldn't drive.

So there you go. Too many mental cycles on a cow orker's paranoia. I hope it was at least somewhat entertaining.