Actually, I don’t think it’s fair on Vegetarians and Vegans to categorise them along with Breatharians.
As far as I can see, Breatharianism is exclusively a religious thing, whereas Veganisn and Vegetarianism may be motivated by any number of reasons and need not necessarily be anything to do with religion.
I also think there’s a fair bit of doublethink happening in the Breatharian camp, all of the interviews I’ve read seem to describe them eating for pleasure whenever they want even though of course they don’t need the nourishment… hmmmmmm, yeah, rrrrrright
I assume you’re talking about pacifying the bees using smoke?
The purpose of this isn’t to ‘gas’ the bees, in fact it’s nothing to do with a toxic effect at all; when bees detect smoke, they return to the hive and fill up with honey, this makes them less active. A good Apiarist will use only the slightest puff of smoke to calm the bees.
I would speculate that this is something to do with the way the bees would behave in the wild if a forest fire was approaching; at the first sign of danger, they return to the nest, gorge themselves on honey and wait; if the fire comes dangerously close, they evacuate (along with the queen) and attempt to make a new nest elsewhere, the honey they stocked up with at the start gives them the necessary energy reserve to start building the new nest.
So it’s not so much gassing/poisoning them as exploiting part of their natural behaviour
I stand corrected. “Apicide” would be the correct term.
I keep bees as a hobby, so I speak from experience.
“re-queening” to keep a hive producing, is deliberate murder of the queen of an existing hive. Kind of a “Coup D’etat,” takeover where you destroy the head of state and replace her with your own puppet leader.
Smoking a hive to manipulate it always kills bees and larvae. When you talk about moving frames around in a hive of 50,000 to 100,000 bees, hundreds get inadvertently crushed each time.
Then, all the bees want to do is get strong enough to swarm. As beekeeper, it’s your job to keep them down. You want a strong hive, but you thwart their swarming by murdering potential queens and and drones in the larval stage. Infanti-apicide? Larvacide?
Bees, of course eat honey, and if you are working a hive for honey production, you don’t want them feeding all that good stuff to their young’uns. So, you remove a few frames of brood, matter of factly murdering tens of thousands of bees.
If you have a bee yard (which I don’t,) it’s not uncommon to murder an entire hive for various reasons.
All this has much improved since the old days when you pretty much destroyed the entire hive harvesting honey, which would result in wholesale slaughter akin to an average World War.
That honey was paid for in the blood of innocent bee-children!
But don’t both Yoo Hoo and cookies contain milk products? I’m pretty sure Yoo Hoo has “milk solids” as an ingrediant. I’m also pretty sure store-bought cookies would have butter, eggs and milk. Would a true vegan eat stuff like that?
And that’s not even including the preservatives and chemicals…
Queens and drones need special “cells” to grow in which are different from your standard honeycomb which can hold, brood, pollen, or honey. You can recognize these pretty easily as they are a lot bigger, and oddly shaped.
Part of the idea of putting in frames with comb on it is so that they can’t build these kind of cells (no room.) They usually get around this pretty quick by destroying parts of normal cone and building drone or queen cells there.
Then, what we do is take hostages and torture them until they tell who the ringleaders are. These are then summarily executed, and their friends sent to a Gulag. The rest of the bees are put on rationing with increased workloads until their will is broken and they promise not to do it again.
What you think of as your basic honey-bee is most likely a three-banded Italian. Honey bees aren’t native to North America.
Parasites like Tracheal and Varona mites have devastated most wild bee colonies in North America, and foulbrood and a host of other diseases have taken their toll as well.
Wild colonies are pretty much on their way out because of this.
A beekeeper feeds his bees in early spring to promote colony strength. He protects them or treats them for parasite and disease, and keeps a healthy active colony which otherwise wouldn’t exist, providing a key ingredient to nature’s balance, re pollinization and stuff.
Let the beekeeper stumble in his righteous and worthy duty, and is not too much of an exageration to say that the entire plant kingdom will pay the price. Without the plants the animals can’t eat and even the Vegans are fucked.
Civilization collapses shortly thereafter and the world reverts to a barren, rocky and lifeless surface.
So yes, much rests on the shoulders of the beekeeper, that unsung hero of conservation and environmental balance.
The question isn’t whether Vegans should eat honey or not, the question is why aren’t they eating more?
Nothing less than earth itself lies in the balance.
How can you measure a few squashed bugs against this? Is that too much of a price to pay?
Many (not all, please don’t jump on me) vegans are a bit on the hypocritical side. Many of them do not hesitate to go see movies or take photos (beef tallow is used in photographic film), many have no problem ingesting medicines which are made partially from animal products, chowing down on peanut butter which is guaranteed to have more insect parts in it than virtually any other food out there. A vegan friend of mine still buys leather shoes. His excuse? They last longer. Another one had a leather wallet. He said it was a gift. Talk about sticking by your principles. roll eyes
I had a friend in college who claimed to be a vegetarian. His diet consisted of McDonald’s French Fries, Coke, Peanut Butter sandwiches and peanut butter on saltines. Never saw him sick once in four years.
But then again, he did have kind of an Oedipal thing going on with his mom.