“Radical vegans — who avoid any product that comes from animals — are now buzzing about the evils of honey.
They claim its production uses the labor of oppressed worker bees, according to a Time magazine report on the growing numbers of American vegetarians.
And kiss a carnivore? Never. The survey revealed that 29 percent of committed vegetarians would refuse to kiss someone who just wolfed down a meal containing meat.
The Time/CNN poll showed that 10 million Americans consider themselves vegetarians, while an additional 20 million people have flirted with a meatless diet.
Well, whatever floats their boats, I guess. Dietarily, I mean. But c’mon, “oppressed worker bees”…?
Fruits and nuts is right.
What’s kinda funny is that anyone, even remotely interested in bee keeping, or honey bees, will tell you that the American Honeybee in the wild is virtually extinct, and the profit on American made honey is virtually non-existant (primarily because of the intense human labor and increased pesticide use and cost that’s involved in keeping colonies from succumbing to disease, and or varoa, or tracheal mites), and the only way bee-keepers are staying afloat is with their pollination contracts for farmers.
Fact is, the only good news in the last ten years for bee keepers (or Americanized European bees, by extension), is the recent decision to include Apis Mellifera (the honeybee) as part of the genome sequencing effort. It’s hoped that we’ll discover a cheaper, less labor intensive, and human-less way to preserve this particular race of bees.
(yes – race, believe it or not – primarily Italian, or Carneolian (Czech/Austrian), or hybrids thereof. Russian Queens haven’t panned out as a solution, and the orignal European honeybee brought to these shores (German Black) proved to be too agressive, so it was replaced by the more docile Alpine races.
Africanized (killer) bees are already resistant, and not threatened. Most of the world’s honey comes from (non European) bees. Fact is American honey producers have been trying (unsuccessfully) for years to get some protection from foreign producers. Africanized bees cannot overwinter in the North, and are not allowed to be transported as the European bee can (can’t imagine why)
True Irony – no real substitute to honeybees for most fruit and vegetable growers that rely on pollination for production exists. No honeybee – fewer, smaller, uglier, and more expensive fruits and veggies.
Mebbe these radical vegans wanna make a living to go out and pollinate the fruits and veggies themselves.
Hmmm. I guess that means, then, that we could accurately call these folks:
“money grubbing racist fruit f**kers promoting European genocide”
http://cyberbee.net/news/mites.htm
Hmm. I <i>have</i> noticed that there aren’t as many bees around as there were when I was a kid… though maybe that just means I don’t notice them like I used to. What I wish there were less of is wasps. They’re all over the place here.
Well, I suppose you could argue that the bee represents the best of the American work ethic. You could also argue it represents the triumph of socialism in nature. Have fun with the argument (although the latter might suggest why these vegans proclaim solidarity with bees).
As for the wasps, they represent the, ummmm… Hitler’s SA? The Mafia? James Carville? Whatever, something dangerous and useless.