Is Honey Vegan?
More people confuse honey as being vegan-friendly than any other animal product. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about honey that cause people to believe that eating honey is necessary, or that bees make honey for humans to eat.
This is far from the truth.
In fact I get asked quite often, “Is honey vegan?”
So why do bees even make honey? It is their food source! It is what they survive and thrive on. The honey bee makes honey to store for their winter food as well. During the colder, winter months, bees cannot go out and collect nectar to make honey. That’s why they work very hard all summer to store honey, so they can feed themselves and their colony all winter. During the winter months, a colony will need to continue to feed around 20,000 workers and a queen, so they spend all their times foraging and preparing for the winter.
Honey is the ideal food for bees, it is full of essential nutrients that they need, and it provides them with lots of energy due to the high sugar content. Whilst flying, a honey bee’s wings beat around 11,400 times per minute. So you can see why the food they eat is very important to how they function. They also beat their wings in the hive to regulate the temperature.
So what happens to the bees when the beekeeper steals the honey and sells it in stores?
The bees are negatively affected. All of their hard work is taken away from them, and instead their honey is replaced with a sugar substitute. This is very bad for them, because sugar does not have any of the essential nutrients, fats, or vitamins that they need. They become weak due to the lack of nutrition in sugar. They also exhaust themselves by working even harder to replace the missing honey that they worked so hard to collect.
Consuming honey does not help the bee population at all. It is a complete lie, and just a way to get people to spend more money and make beekeepers richer. Consuming honey destroys lives of honey bee’s, and takes advantage of all their hard work.
Honey bees are very abused because of the high demand for honey.
Here are some facts that really show how hard these bees have to work to make honey for themselves:
- To produce one single pound of honey, foraging bees have to fly for 55,000 miles.
- Honey bees will only produce around 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in their entire life. That’s why there are so many honey bees working so very hard to collect honey for the cooler months.
- A honey bee visits up to 100 flowers per foraging trip.
- It takes 556 foraging bees to visit 2 million flowers, just to make one single pound of honey.
- Honey bees never ever sleep. They are constantly working and busy.
- One pound of honey is the lifetime work of 768 bees.
Isn’t that mind blowing? Honey bees are such a hard working species. They do not deserve to have their hard work taken away from them. Unlike bees, us humans can live without honey in our diets. There are so many vegan alternatives for people who enjoy honey. Date syrup, maple syrup, corn syrup, golden syrup, and agave nectar are all readily available in stores for you to buy. There is even a product called Bee Free Honee which is made out of apples!
Hopefully this article opened your eyes up to why honey bees work so hard to make honey, and why it is so wrong to steal it from them.
So your answer to, is honey vegan? No!
