Vegan Practically

I’m on a photography tour of France right now with a group of people who aren’t vegan. And though everyone is nice about it (at least to my face!), it’s been a bit of a challenge. When I’m trying to get along with people, especially new people, I’m not inclined to go toe-to-toe about reasons to be vegan. But people are sometimes curious, and so I answer questions when they are posed. Such is how I came to be talking about the reasons vegans don’t eat honey the other day.

I said the usual things about this. First, honey is produced through the labour of bees, so it’s an animal product. Therefore it is not vegan. This doesn’t mean there is some debate about whether it’s “okay,” but strictly speaking it’s not vegan and that’s the simple reason vegans don’t eat it. It was a source of confusion for me at the beginning, but I get it now. Second, honey is a food source for the offspring and for the hive through the winter. So when we take it we are removing a food source and replacing it with a poor copy that lacks the micronutrients of the original (obviously we are not replacing it with honey). I have blogged about this before. For a fuller set of reasons, have a look at the older post.

While I was talking about this to the person who asked, someone else offered an opinion that I’d never heard before: as pollinators, don’t bees eat nectar, not honey? I’m used to people trying to derail perfectly legitimate reasons for not being keen on the exploitation of non-human creatures, so I asked what they thought the reason for bees producing honey was? The answer: because that’s what honeybees do.

Well, just give me an actual break. Given the amount of work that goes into making honey, “that’s just what they do” is not much of an explanation. Not being a bee authority, I stood down (not that I felt any less confident that the honeybees use honey as a food source). But the fact is, honeybees do make honey as a food source, especially to feed the young and to get the whole hive through the winter months. They collect nectar in order to make honey. It’s really quite an amazing team effort. An article in The New Scientist describes it like this:

“A worker bee sucks up the nectar through a long, thin tube called a proboscis and keeps it in a special honey stomach, known as the crop, which can hold up to 80 per cent of a bee’s weight in nectar. Inside, the bee’s enzymes, including one called invertase, begin to break down the complex sugars into simpler ones that are less prone to crystallising.

“Once the worker returns to the hive, forager bees pass the nectar to each other from mouth to mouth. Workers that are younger than the foragers then pack the nectar into hexagon-shaped cells in the honeycomb that are made of beeswax. Next, they fan the nectar with their wings to encourage evaporation.”

So while it might be a nice story to tell that the honeybees live on nectar and so don’t have any interest in using the honey they produce for themselves, it’s false.