Hey guys welcome to vegan nugget number 14. Were going to talk all about honey. People
often ask if honey is considered vegan. The short answer, no. Most people tend to shy
away from bee's, and it's a little harder for people to get the warm and fuzzies about
them. Although they are fuzzy. For the most part, bees are not valued like other animals.
Could this be due to intelligence? Countless studies have shown the incredible intelligence
of bees. In the well-documented waggle dance, bees use vector calculus and physics. After
finding a food source, forager bees return to the hive and perform a dance for the other
bees, which conveys all the information they need to go to the food source. Now not only
does this dance convey the direction of the food source, but also the distance to it.
As if that's not complex enough, every 4 minutes the sun moves 1° to the west. Bee's actually
account for this in their dance. It's been documented that every 4 minutes, the angle
of their dance moves 1° to account for the movement of the sun. So you can't really knock
a bee's intelligence. I mean really, how many humans are using vector calculus to get themselves
to the grocery store? Hell we're lucky if we don't drive into a lake just because our
GPS told us to. So if the intelligence argument doesn't do it for you, how about the ability
to feel pain? If a living being can feel pain, how can it be ethical to inflict pain upon
them? And yes there are numerous scientific studies documenting that bee's in fact do
feel pain. How are we to say whose pain matter and whose pain does not? Is it only humans,
is it only humans and their pet, is it only warm and fuzzy animals? Now aside from intelligence
and their ability to feel pain, we come to the real issue that most vegans have with
the honey industry. The enslavement of bees and the stealing of their honey. And I know
you might be saying "bees are slaves, really?" I'd like again to turn to a quote by Alice
Walker. She says "the animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not
made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for
men." The bee's will not make honey if they don't have a queen. Some beekeepers will order
queens, many of which have been artificially inseminated, a process in which male bee's
are crushed and drained of their semen, which is then forcefully inserted into a queen bee.
Travel can be rough on the queens, who are often injured or killed in transit. When a
queen arrives in the mail and eventually get boxed, beekeepers rip off her wings to prevent
her from flying away. Within the honey industry there is quite a lack of regard for the bee's
lives. A lot of beekeepers kill off their hives before winter, especially with the large
factory bee farms. The life and death of these entire colonies are decided purely on economic
ground. Still want some honey? Let's look at how honey is actually made. Bee's swallow
nectar into their crop, they regurgitate it, add enzymes to it, meaning spit, chew it,
swallow it, and repeat many times. Each droplet of nectar is swallowed and regurgitated 50
times. You heard me right, your sweet sweet honey is bee vomit. Let's turn to Gary Yourofsky
once more for a little nugget of truth. And what about vomit? Come on you guys love vomit.
You adore vomit in on and all over your food. Then they give this one a pretty name though,
no one's going to want to buy and eat vomit, unless we call it honey instead. Honey comes
directly from a bee's stomach, it's regurgitated right through a bee's mouth. Look that up
with any wildlife biologist but, no one wants to eat Bee's Vomit Nut Cheerios, we want Honey
Nut Cheerios, so we lie to ourselves and play euphemism games. The standard diet of meat,
dairy, and egg eater is blood, flesh, veins, muscles, tendons, cow secretions, things that
come out of a hens ass, and bee vomit. Bee's use their honey, really their vomit, as hive
insulation and food for themselves and for their babies. Still don't give a [bleep] about
bee's? How about your health. While honey is often marketed as a healthy natural sweetener,
all bee products contain sugar, animal protein, and fat. And are unequivocally unhealthy.
Now honey is the perfect food, for bees. According to T.C. Fry, "when humans eat honey, it immediately
begins to reabsorb moisture from the stomach and stomach flora. It destroys our symbiotic
bacterial population wholesale. In humans, honey, more so than cane and beet sugar, is
acid forming and decalcifying. The body draws calcium from its teeth and bones, if necessary,
to neutralize the acids introduced and formed. The manite acid of honey is a protoplasmic
poison. It interacts with protein and from this, forms alcohol, ammonia and carbonic
acid." Now if your sitting there and saying I'm a human, I'm on the top of the evolutionary
ladder, think about this. If every bee species were to drop dead tomorrow, it would have
an absolutely detrimental effect on agriculture, plant life, and food sources around the world.
If we lost all pollinators, foods sources as we know them would vanish. However, if
you take the mighty all-important human, and wipe our species off the face of the earth,
every other living thing would benefit. So perhaps we should think about this when we
are ranking the importance of a species race. If it comes down to who's the most useful,
we humans are going to be the first to go. Whether we're looking at the violation of
a bee's rights based on their intelligence, their ability to feel pain, their right to
not be enslaved, or have their food stolen, or the fact that every droplet of honey has
been barfed and re-barfed 50 times, or the unfortunate unhealthy aspects of honey, or
the environmental importance of bee's as well as the environmental detriment that they are
to North America. All in all, honey is about as far from vegan as you can get. I hope you
guys enjoyed this nugget, please go to bitesizevegan.com as well as subscribe to the channel. Make
sure to comment and like the video, and I'll see you guys next time.