I Think Honey Is Vegan...Here's Why!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ต.ค. 2022
- In this video we take another look at " Is Honey Vegan or Can Vegans Eat Honey? " Whichever way you want to look at the Honey Vegan Debate. We covered this subject back in 2019;
• IS HONEY VEGAN?
The feedback from the video was really good and it sparked healthy debate between vegans and beekeepers.
I wanted to cover this subject again as more and more videos appear on the internet talking about beekeeping and frankly some of their stats and figures and claims are misleading and wrong.
So Is Honey Vegan Friendly? My answer is yes! I do think honey is ok for vegans to eat.
We dont kill the bees to produce Honey
We dont steal all the honey and feed them sugar syrup! (this is taken out of context)
Here is a video of how we normally take the honey crop off;
• Clearing Honey From A ...
The truth of the matter is Bee farming and beekeeping is a crucial part of producing Vegan Food. It would be impossible to produce vegetarian and vegan food on any scale without the pollination honeybees carry out. Nothing pollinates as good and as effective has honeybees.
Hopefully you enjoy the video and do leave me a comment in the comment section id love to hear your view on it.
To find out more about me you can visit my website on;
gwenyngruffydd.co.uk
Or find me on Social Media on @GwenynGruffydd
I am a beekeeper and also a vegan so I think it’s possible to produce honey and keep bees ethically. But I will never clip a queens wing - this is the one common practice that I think is unacceptable.
Great points!
Yeah, it's certainly interesting. I'm interested in where the reports of culling beehives for the winter are coming from? Is it a regional thing? Natural pollinators are certainly better at pollinating natural plants than honey bees, but certainly there needs to be more than natural pollinators to grow crops. I'd think that there would be a certain amount of honey production that would be acceptable to vegans, but anything that infringes on natural pollinators with no benefit to keeping people fed would be seen as problematic.
Veganism is a stance that rejects the exploitation and commodification of animals. It's not about killing an animal or reducing suffering, it's the rejection of the idea that man should use animals. Maybe you can use a new word like "honeytarian"?
That’s really great to hear. Fellow vegan here that is super interested in beekeeping. I hate the infighting in our community.
@avamolinaro5559 just FYI veganism is a stance against the exploitation (use) of animals. If you want to follow vegan principles, please leave the bees alone.
I think you should explain more about how you care for the Bees, such as keeping out the mites and other predators, great video.
Thank you 😊
Great info, thanks for taking the time to make this video and explain your perspective as an actual beer farmer - I found it very valuable. There is a way for us to produce food that is in harmony with the rest of nature, I would highly recommend researching permaculture. It can solve all our problems. We really aren't supposed to be at war with the rest of nature in our food production, and we don't have to be. If I had my own permaculture 'farm', I always imagined I would incorporate bee keeping - not because nature needs it, but because I want the honey. So that would entail a responsibility to take good care of the bees of course - and have a good relationship with them, a quid pro quo kinda situation. As a vegan I have consumed honey off and on. I always had a feeling that in the big picture, with the way we are currently producing food, honey isn't something to make a big deal out of, especially if people are buying it locally from small scale farmers who aren't mean to the bees. 🤷
It should be considered vegan in my eyes. You can ethically source honey. I get mine from a local farmer. I also have pet chickens and eat their eggs so I’m not really popular amongst vegans. I won’t do cheese however because i don’t believe there’s an ethical way to source that. Maybe if you could do it without impregnating the mother.
I also am okay with (ethical) honey as a vegan, I don't think it is necessarily problematic. If I had land I always imagined I'd do some bee keeping. I've also never had a problem with people eating eggs from pet and rescue chickens, I just have problems with considering chickens solely as egg/meat producers rather than living beings who deserve care and happiness. I wouldn't personally eat the eggs because I don't believe they are healthy, but I don't mind others eating them so long as they aren't partaking in the chicken slave trade and being d!cks to the chickens. 🤷 I know many vegans disagree , and would even try to disqualify me as a vegan for my views, but oh well, I am an individual who will think for myself and they will have to f'n deal with it.
I'm in agreement, plus the bee's themselves kill vastly more bee's than the bee keeper. Every year the drones are killed off.
And i think it's the most environmently friendly way of producing a food type.
100%
It would only be vegan if the bees consent to their honey being taken. Although beekeepers benefit them, they might not want to hand it over without a better deal
I think their getting a great deal 😊
we medicate them to keep them alive, no better deal than that ,they would die without us.
I think Beekeeping and Honey is the one thing that makes me think, that the current definition of Vegan needs to be expanded & updated to Ethical Consumption/Production and harm reduction (working towards a future with no large scale industrial production, and no exploitation of fellow living creatures deserving of our respect and love) instead of strictly being defined by not eating animal produce. If we take into account that not all Bee's are kept in the same standards though, then your points about the fact that Vegans should buy Honey kind of falls flat, esp if your American for example you might go into the supermarket expecting to buy Honey, but leave with sugar syrup. As a Vegan since 2 years now and I've been Vegetarian since I was 17, I think allot about these subjects and am quite invested in producing my own food and being organic etc. I would love my own Chickens for example, because I want to give them a good life free from overproduction and battery farming or exploitation, but I could not call myself Vegan if I eat their potential unfertilized Eggs for example (I am against food waste though also because I consider that to be unethical, so I would not want to make the choice to throw away food instead of eating it, no matter what it is). I think this current definition of Veganism currently actually damages the movement and it's reputation, esp because of all the critics and ... well arseholes imo who are contrary because of a potential select few Vegans that they believe to be hypocritical. Semantics and definitions are important though and for that reason we can't just take a clearly defined word and change it's definition on a whim. I think there needs to be some widespread change, or a new word perhaps for people who don't quite fit into the current definition of the word Vegan, but still identify themselves with the general sentiments and political ideology of Veganism.
we have pet chickens and eat their eggs and I consider myself vegan. I would never eat the egg of any hen that we don’t care for. I eat local honey from small beekeepers. I call myself vegan because I am, when I go out with people I order vegan food and I cook 99.9% vegan in my own home. Our hens are all rescued and wether or not they produce eggs doesn’t matter to us. We also feed half their eggs back to them no matter what. We only eat the excess, because I, like you, believe that food waste is wrong.
You have convinced me that honey is vegan. I would say just on the crop deaths from plant agriculture, or bee deaths from bee farming, that if we release those bees in the wild or replace plant agriculture with wilderness I think way more deaths occur especially in the case for bees if the percentage of deaths you estimate is accurate, so yeah good video 👍
Thank you 😊
This is an interesting video, I knew of ppl who did beekeeping back home and it was extremely far removed from what was presented on earthling Ed's video. Its a lot closer to how you described it. I don't think Ed is being dishonest or that what he said never happened im sure it has but there are plenty of ethical beekeepers out there. Also back home to my knowledge the bees used are the same bees in the locality so no invasive species. Mostly small time bee keeping for some spare honey in the neighborhood. Its interesting to see different perspectives on this.
Thanks for the comment. Appreciate your your balanced viewpoint 😊
I am a 58 year old vegan beekeeper from the day I was born and Earthling Ed's video should be deleted because it's very wrong. Without bees we'd have no fruit or almonds either. Without beekeeping we'd have no healthy population of honeybees. Eat honey for the sake of pollination. He was wrong about honey being baby bee food also. Baby bees and queens main food is not honey it is a white bee milk secretion made by adult female bees. Hes a misinformation agent and suspect he may not even be a real vegan.
Finally someone speaking some logic, thanks god !
There are so many things that people wont eat for so many different reasons these days that it is hard to keep up with, and also rather pointless in my point of view. What is a little bit bewildering is that ultra processed food, non-vegan as well as vegan, is still as popular as ever either bought in the convenient plastic wrapped containers in the supermarket, or in places like McDonalds, KFC, and whatever else they are called. You ask a child today where milk comes from and they answer the supermarket and I will argue that most people are still very, very naïve when it comes to recognising good and healthy food from the factory processed look-alikes.
Great comment
True, all the stuff we continually buy in plastic glass etc is very problematic and exploitative of nature as well. Veganism as a whole ought to get more educated on, and involved with, permaculture practices. All humans ideally would be involved in 'farming' / sustainable food production, for ourselves and the rest of nature... If we all made this our occupation rather than obsession with $ and technology advancement we'd be able correct all the problems in the earth.
The bees are farmed by the Beekeeper but they are not animal they are insects. They create a totally vegetable plant based product from the forage. The only ethical problem is they are farmed. Plants are farmed as well so honey is vegan.
Great Post, well explained and all makes sense...
Thank you
Yes, I'm vegan for the animals and will eat smoke free, wild or ethically produced honey. Nothing wrong with this ancient food from nature.
😊
Great video got the message across well
Thanks Paul 😊
If honey is not vegan, neither is spinach or tomatoes.
ALL veggies are harvested by meat bag humans and stored up till consumed just like nectar and pollen are harvested by bees and stored till consumed.
The honey and pollen are not an animal product like milk or eggs.
It does not come from the bees. They are merely harvesting the honey and pollen and storing it.
"It does not come from the bees" ...Honey literally comes from the mouth of bees. It's essentially bee vomit.
@@T_Armstrong"bee vomit" isn't exactly accurate. Vomiting is an unpleasant response to something gone wrong in the stomach/body, and what comes up is not desirable nor healthy to re-consume. Bee bodies spitting up the pollen/nectar is a natural and healthy thing they are supposed to do, and it is quite a healthy and desirable thing to consume. And from what I have witnessed with ethical bee keepers, the bees don't mind sharing their honey so long as people aren't d!cks to them.
That's my argument as well. At the end of the day we are only really custodians. They are free to leave and just about everyone have lost a swarm at some time. Since all honey sold in the UK has to adhere to the Honey regulations 2015 and traceable there is a guarantee of purity. Unfortunately due to honey fraud from imports, especially China and 'produce of more than one country' they can't guarantee the purity. Also in the US they transport hives across many states often for mono-culture. Perhaps UK produced and traceable honey could be regulated specifically as vegan for the more strict ones.
“Free to leave” what do you call queen wing clipping?
Great points.
@@sinisterhipp0 it's a choice not a necessity hence custodian. Even so hives still split naturally during a swarm and everybody loses one or two in their lifetime. Bees can and do abscond and leave their queen, clipped or not clipped if they are not happy with their hive, a failing queen or the hive is not big enough. Pre-emptive splits such as a Demaree are only a form of responsible management. They are not forced to stay. Some go back to their original hive whilst others choose to stay in their new location.
@@sinisterhipp0 Queen clipping is utterly unacceptable I agree
I don’t wing wing clip. But wing clipping isn’t recorded when you buy or sell honey, so consumers won’t know the facts about honey they are buying. Especially in group/bulk honey products from multiple producers.
I'm vegan mostly for ecological reasons, although ethical reasons are important to me as well. I think honey is certainly not the worst, but it's hard for me to consider it vegan, because as i understand it (and i did help someone collect their honey years ago, before i was vegan), bees very much don't agree about you taking their honey, and you have to intoxicate them (temporarily) to ensure they don't get in the way too much, but that's still not a pleasant business and you have to protect yourself otherwise they are going to sting, seeing you as an agressor.
Regarding the comparison with agriculture, i understand the vegan ethics as not aiming for elimination of all animal suffering, it's obviously an impossible goal, but as reducing it as much as possible, and producing the amount of food we need without mechanized agriculture, seems out of reach as well, so yes, there will be some suffering involved, and while we ought to reduce that, we can hardly to better than avoiding wasting food and overproducing to compensate.
But your other points are good, i agree that if you manage not to kill too many bees while collecting/handling the beehives, and you prevent the queen to access the boxes from whom you collect, it's already a good start. Do you have a system to ensure that bees are all out of the collect box before you collect, so you don't need to fight them? That seems a bit hard to conceive, but I'm willing to be surprised.
Hi,
Thanks for the comment. Appreciate your views.
We normally take the honey off with clearer boards. No need to intoxicate the bees.
th-cam.com/video/FuGZGXwtw4U/w-d-xo.html
Truth is bees and vegan food are linked together. There is a large number of bee farmers that make a good living from pollinating crops to produce vegan food. I believe we are on the same team 😊
@@gwenyngruffydd ok, thanks for answering, glad this system exist, though you still use smoke to repel the bees, that's what i meant by intoxicating them.
Another thing i wanted to mention, you tell about bees being on the decline, my understanding is that wild bees, which are often in competition with honey bees, are much more affected, that's more about the ecology than about veganism, but depending on the situation, putting beehives can actually be very much frown upon by conservationists.
Fair point, but the main reason that bees (all types) are in decline is due to the Agri chemicals used in food production. Mainly on fruit, veg and nuts.
In those mono crop areas bees need to be brought in from thousands of miles away in the states because every insect is basically dead in the areas.
Mono crop farming is terrible for ecology.
In Beekeeing we don’t kill any pests or use agri chemicals on the land.
We can both point flaws in vegan food and Beekeeing. Beekeeing is far less harmful to the environment than any form of farming.
In general where there are bees wildlife thrives.
I am ethical towards animals ,am vegan and a beekeeper. That said bees are sacred to me but they are insects. Think about this, you would not hesitate to kill fleas, ticks, cockroaches, flies, lice, wasps?If we all stop eating honey and supporting bees, humans would exterminate them for being stinging pests. We'd no longer have any major food crops requiring pollination. YES honey is as vegan a fruit.
Research permaculture! There are ways to grow abundant food without being in harmful competition with nature, and the vegan community ought to be getting educated on and promoting it. Especially considering many of the arguments against vegans is about the inherent harmfulness of commercial crop production - the good news is there are solutions to those issues, but vegans remain largely ignorant.
We have a vegetarian living with us at the moment and it puzzles me the amount of plant based foods that are made to look like meat Produce. Like Sausage, rashers, chicken nuggets, burgers and so on. Even a vegan honey (syrup).
I see their point in the cruelty in some meat factory’s, I don’t like that myself and thats why I carefully chose where I buy my meat. I agree with you with the loss of insect life in the planting and spraying to produce plant base foods and yes animal feed, I do believe that most vegetarians and vegans do it for the greater good, lifestyle and for health reasons but for some it’s for their ego and condescending personality!, and are well able to over look the Loss of life and habitat in the producing plant based foods. Honey is a healthier option to most type of sugar and is in most cases a 100% natural and cruelty free
Fully agree
Because a vegan can acknowledge that they LIKE eating meat, and the taste of it, and want products that are similar to it, but don't necessarily want to consume actual animal meat for ethical reasons. That's why the meat imitation products exist in the first place, for people who like burgers and hot dogs and nuggets but don't want to contribute to animal suffering.
@@zen-sufi exactly! I want a veggie burger at the family bbq lol. I’m a college student and convenience foods like vegan chicken nuggets make up more of my diet than I’d like but it makes it accessible for me to eat and dorm and live as a vegan on campus. During the summer I eat more whole foods.
We live in a culture which has normalized animal products as food - growing up being fed these 'foods' we develop psychological/physiological attachments to them. Eating a tasty savory meaty substance between bread topped with tasty condiments is an enjoyable experience we become accustomed to - there is nothing wrong with replacing the corpse flesh with a similar substance (tastier too, in my experience) made with plants. Though I agree the plastic/packaging/chemicals/petrol etc in the supermarket system is a big problem for vegan and non-vegans alike. So let's support and advocate for healthy solutions, they exist!
I agree well done.
Thank you
Well said and you didn't even touch on the effects of producing almond milk!
Thanks Anne 😊
yep no human walks upon this earth with an innocent step
That’s very true
But we should continually try to improve the way we live, don't you think? This attitude can be a self-defeating cop out from even trying to be responsible. There are people discovering amazing solutions to the Earth's problems (permaculturists), we can do so much better!
Very well said! 👍🏻 Congratulations on the beautiful bubba 😍 x
Thank you 😊
Good video
Thank you 😊
I'm a vegan and you've convinced me to eat honey. Your sheep look pretty tasty too....
😄
LOL
I agree, as I’m a beekeeper and I’m not vegan. However I understood Vegans won’t have any produce from any animal derived products. As this is seen as exploiting the animals. I’ve never heard about the animal having to die to class that product as non vegan?
Fair point
If I were to be vegan I would certainly eat honey. Although there are practices that I don’t think would do. Alcohol washing for mite drop, instrumental insemination and although helping the bees using things like apivar to kill mites doesn’t sound very vegan. I don’t think you’ll ever convince some even though I bet they all drive cars
Great points, we spray vegetables and fruits to kill mites and pests too. It’s a gray line for sure
@@gwenyngruffydd I had a look on the vegan website and they basically say it’s not vegan because it’s exploitation of the bees. I don’t agree with some of the points on there though. One said that bee farmers often cull their bees at the end of season to keep costs down, now I have no idea where they got that rubbish from.
Fake news
Agree, no additives, natural production. Honey so good for you, I put it on cuts n scrapes, spoonful for sore throat, mouth ulcers etc. another great educational video
Thank you. Glad you see it the same way 😊
You will never convince vegans of anything because this isn't a scientific argument. It's a political stance, and rational thought isn't required nor particularly welcome.
I'm not anti-vegan, and know vegans who do eat honey. But for the most part, I just try to understand their needs and adjust to them. We bake vegan foods at almost every family gathering, so I'm used to the flexibility in the rules. But I also know they aren't open to any discussions of their rules. We just ask if white sugar, or honey, or whatever is ok and they either say yes or no.
I find pro-vegan arguments are generally quite rational, and often quite scientific, especially compared to the counter arguments. But honey I have never been fully convinced is nonvegan, and always was kinda interested in bee keeping myself. Plus honey, unlike meat/milk/eggs/etc, is actually good for us. And ideally bee keeping benefits the bees too. I believe if humans lived on the earth properly, we would have mutually beneficial relationships with all critters and life forms, and bee keeping fits into that ideal.
Honey is definitely Plant Based. Nobody can argue with that!
😊👍🏻
Honey isn't vegan. It's an animal product.
The principal of veganism isn't about not consuming animal products per se, it is about refraining from exploiting and causing harm/suffering to animals. If certain animal products are actually healthy for us and the animals / nature benefit in the production of it, it is technically vegan.
vegans wouldnt be allowed to eat anything that cost money is what they are saying. Just the genetics envolved in plants would argue is humans preventing insects like wasp to control lettuce.
they agree with stepping on ants lol every thing has the same orgins of life
but we all agree on the survival of all animals on earth
go eat the Honey they evolved with us
Veganism is about politics not ethics. Their tortuous definition. Their loss.
So is purposely missing the point
This is not correct
Honey comes from bees. It’s “derived from animals” so it can’t be vegan.
I’m no vegan, I am a beekeeper.
Bees are Insects... Not Animals. That would be Sci-Fi Sized Bees !!! Imagine a Sting from something that Size. OUCH !
🤭
Cough* Animalia Kingdom cough* cough* biological scientific cough* classifications.
Excuse me. Terrible cough I have.
@@mmb_MeAndMyBees insects are a sub-group of animals. A quick google search will confirm this.
Honey is NOT derived from bees like milk from cows or eggs from chickens.
If you believe honey is an animal product then you would have to believe your veggies are an animal product because your veggies are harvested by meat bag humans. Honey (nectar) is harvested by bees and stored till ready to be consumed.
It does not come from the bees it comes from flowers. Flowers are vegan, the nectar and pollen in the flower is vegan.
Bees are the farm hands harvesting the vegan products.
Are the Mexicans harvesting your avocado vegan?
Those avocado are derived from Mexicans you know.
The vegan ethic is about not harming and exploiting animals, not about what we put in our mouths or not. If bee keeping is a mutually beneficial situation for bees and humans and plants and animals, there is no reason for vegans to denounce it. Whether honey production is inherently exploitative or harmful is indeed up for debate from my perspective.