Science Memes

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Honey (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 93 points 1 month ago (95 children)

I feel like bees are a bit of a grey area. We're not eating them, we're kind of like landlords that give them a nice place to stay and they pay rent in honey. I'm not vegan so I'm not quite sure what the rationale is for bee stuff.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Eh, I doubt most people care about being vegan for the sake of being vegan, but as has been said, honey bees are bad for pollinators, so from a moral viewpoint, you get to the same conclusion.

Ultimately, though, honey isn't hard to give up. Certainly nothing that I felt was worth contemplating whether it's grey area or not.
At best, it's annoying, because the weirdest products will have honey added. One time, I accidentally bought pickles with honey, and they were fucking disgusting.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

honey bees are bad for pollinators

Hm? What do you mean?

From this paper:

A. mellifera appears to be the most important, single species of pollinator across the natural systems studied, owing to its wide distribution, generalist foraging behaviour and competence as a pollinator.

This is a genuine question btw.

[–] frosch 24 points 1 month ago

I read an article on this a while back that made me refrain from actually getting bees. I can’t find it right now, but the gist is that domesticated honeybees will compete with a lot of other pollinators (mainly solitary bees) over the exact same food sources.

However, the honeybees have a gigantic advantage in being supervised, housed and generally looked after by the apiary. Which will also employ methods to stimulate hive-growth, driving the hives demand for food.

That is something a solitary bee - or another pollinator depending on the same nutrition - cannot compete with, driving them away.

So, in a nutshell: adding bees to a place already rich in honeybees? Whatever. Adding honeybees into a local ecosystem not having them rn? That will drastically lower biodiversity

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