Honey is not vegan simply because it is an animal by-product. We need to be protecting the other pollinators.

I often get asked if honey is vegan, and I wrote about this not long ago in the post: How Honey is Made and Why Vegans Don’t Eat It.

I’ll do a wee overview of that post:

The bee has a large nervous system capable of transmitting pain signals. You can witness this yourself as bees move to avoid pain. Stinging a human is a last resort for the honey bee because one sting and it dies. Those hives you think are great homes believing the bee is free – think again. We enslave the bee with those apiaries and force it to make honey for our use.

Bees make the honey to have food over the winter months. 

In the commercial trade, while they are out working for us, we rob their hive and steal their core products of honey, royal jelly and beeswax. This is done in the autumn, leaving the bees without nutrition for the winter. Instead, we feed them on sugar supplements. 

The more ethical beekeepers do harvest the honey in the spring. However, there is still the process of harvesting the honey, and even beekeepers who love and respect their bees have unavoidable deaths.

For some beekeepers, killing off their hives before winter makes economic sense. This is usually done by the larger, ‘factory farming’ style of beekeeping rather than the smaller, privately owned beekeepers.

Now, that’s a quick overview, but now it gets interesting.

I recently watched a video from Ed Winters about Spirituality: The Enemy of Veganism – a great video and I encourage you to watch it. A small reference was made about honeybees, which suddenly gave me a light-bulb moment.

Here was another, even more dramatic reason (especially for those environmentalists) for not having honey.

Experts at the Department of Zoology at Cambridge University said,

“The crisis in global pollinator decline has been associated with one species above all, the western honeybee. Honeybees are artificially bred agricultural animals similar to livestock, such as pigs and cows. But this livestock can roam beyond any enclosures to disrupt local ecosystems through competition and disease.

Keeping honeybees is an extractive activity. It removes pollen and nectar from the environment, which are natural resources needed by many wild species of bees and other pollinators.”

We are doing all we can to protect apiaries and protect the honeybees. We are even encouraged to have hives in our backyard. Sadly, we’re not urged to protect the other pollinators. In Aotearoa, N.Z., our primary wild pollinators are bumblebees, native bees, birds, hoverflies, butterflies, moths and beetles.

We need nectar-rich plants growing in our gardens. So any size garden (even planter boxes) planted with wildflowers and other well-chosen plants will help. And add some water, perhaps a birdbath or create a natural pond. Did you know that muddy puddles and edges of ponds provide salts and nutrients as well as the water?

Of course, no chemicals in the garden. Even organic ones can be harmful to pollinators.

Let’s focus on bringing more wild pollinators into our backyards. 

Until next time…