The Environmental Problem With Honey

The problem with honey is not that it's not raw. The problem with honey is not that it's not organic. The problem with honey is not that it's fair trade.

The problem with honey is not that we're doing it wrong. The problem with honey is that it's honey.

See, a lot of so-called raw "vegans" don't know this, but the problem is honey itself. The problem with Colony Collapse Disorder is just one in a long string of problems with the honey industry, starting with the idea that other creatures on Earth are ours to do with as we wish. (That's speciesism, dear, and real vegans are against that shit, sorry to pull the Real Vegan stuff with you - but it's not just a diet. It's ethics.) The next problem came when we started domesticating bees, historically a sign that things are gonna go real bad real soon. And once we started domesticating bees, like farmed salmon, we began crowding out - environmentally, food-wise or just in terms of space - the native bees. This is always a dangerous precedent: once you have a breed of "good ____ producers", you tend to use that exclusively, and so do all your neighbors, until finally you have very little diversity.

You can see where this is going, right? Listen to me: the reason that CCD is happening at all is because humans commercialised bees in the first place, and then continued doing it. To me, it's perfectly natural that CCD would occur, given that commercial beekeepers usually take all the honey, or most of it, and then feed the bees on sugar water over the winter. (They also tend to kill off most of the bees during this time, too. And we were saying that honey was vegan how... ?) See, if humans are take this supposedly "life-giving" honey, then the bees are not getting it, they're getting an inferior substance to the stuff that they have been "designed" to produce for themselves throughout millions and millions of years. I honestly wonder how we could have done a better job of precipitating CCD.

So yeah, dudes. It's your fault that we have CCD. Stop eating honey, because eating "raw, organic, fair trade" honey is NOT going to make the problem go away - it'll only make it worse!

And a note for the health nuts (and by "nuts" I mean actually insane, because their logical faculties clearly have been bamboozled by the nutzoid but highly charismatic David Wolfe):

Yes, honey is full of digestive enzymes. They're bee enzymes, not human enzymes. Cow enzymes would probably be as useful to us as bee enzymes, you know. (Yeah, I'm not actually promoting eating cow vomit, I'm just pointing out that little logical fallacy, there.)

So, short answer: when you eat honey, you destroy the environment as well as bees' lives and humans' claim to being a species that can make moral decisions.