That wasn't the argument. It was that bees are sentient, and honey has no redeeming qualities.Neptual wrote: While honey has no redeeming nutritional qualities neither do Oreos, or Doritos but vegans and non vegans alike still enjoy them. Because it doesn't have any nutritional qualities therefore we shouldn't eat it is a bad argument.
Eating something with no redeeming qualities may be fine if it doesn't harm a sentient being to obtain.
If it has redeeming qualities, those can in part make up for that harm (which is why I mentioned crickets as more justifiable than honey).
Is it not correlated, or does correlation not equal causation?Neptual wrote:As for the Colony Collapse there is no proof that the harvesting of honey is directly correlated in that process. Correlation does not equal causation.
I didn't want to get into details here, but I can. Although maybe another thread should be started (or resurrected).
It's also much better for the environment to eat insect protein compared to other animal products.
Insect protein is taken in the first world to replace other animal based proteins by people who believe animal based protein is superior. There's no reason this superiority should be believed to be true, but it is a relatively efficient source of protein and vitamins, particularly for people in the third world where high quality plant protein is harder to produce with their infrastructure, and very difficult for them to process. Crickets and the like can process many otherwise inedible or difficult to eat plant materials that grow where people don't have the know how or infrastructure for superior agricultural practices.
There are actually some good arguments for eating insects, since the efficiency concerns are much less than for other animal products, particularly as a replacement.
Honey production, on the other hand, I do not believe is better for the environment,
This is the core of the issue. Bees produce honey, then the honey is taken away and replaced with sugar and other stuff, which the bees have to reprocess into honey again but which is generally recognized to be nutritionally problematic.
The bottom line is that honey harvesting isn't really about making anything and providing a net yield, it's just swapping something out (which turns out to be worse for humans AND the bees). The modern process is less efficient than just eating sugar. AND, as it turns out, less healthy.
There's no good argument for eating honey. Like sugar, it's relatively useless nutritionally, but it's also filled with potentially dangerous pathogens, less efficient than producing and using the sugar directly, and contains much more fructose, which makes it nutritionally inferior to sucrose from a human health perspective.
"I expect has quite a bit to do with Colony Collapse." This was more of a footnote, but I can explain in more detail WHY that is the case. I'm not pulling it out of my ass (it's just not very relevant to the topic at hand).Neptual wrote:As for the Colony Collapse there is no proof that the harvesting of honey is directly correlated in that process. [...] It does not matter what you 'expect' but rather what is backed and supported by evidence which in this instance there is none for.
However, this was the more important point:
We need bees to pollinate our flowers and produce a lot of crops, so anything that threatens them I take as a serious problem, particularly when it's completely unnecessary like Honey harvesting.
The fact that over-harvesting of honey may be involved is a reason to stop it, even without proof positive, because honey provides no actual advantages beyond a very slight subsidization of the cost of food from flowering plants (which is not any advantage to vegans, because at best you're taking money from one pocket, and putting it (after the honey man's cut) into the other).
Consider the standards for evidence based medicine. It must be both safe AND effective.
In the case of veganism, at minimum we should be obligated to ask only if something is harmless OR useful.
If something is useful, it may be enough to just show that it's not very harmful, or show that it's unlikely to be very harmful (in excess of its usefulness) -- like medicine.
However, if something is useless, a greater burden must be put on showing that it is also harmless. In the case of honey, that burden has not been met.
See the precautionary principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
Which applies even more when a practice is useless or worse (as is the case of honey).
Honey is worse than merely useless in that it is actively unhealthy, and yet through misconception and dishonest marketing promoted as a healthier alternative to sugar.
Honey is worse than merely useless in that it is wasteful in agricultural terms. We can produce comparable or superior sweeteners in every regard with greater efficiency than honey affords.
At best, honey may be blameless for CCD, but this has not been proven (and is extremely unlikely, since our practices drastically affect bees lives). We don't really know for sure what's causing it, so anything that might be causing it must be suspect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder
The red bold cause is directly related to increase honey consumption and harvesting by humans (and replacement with sugar and other substitutes).Wikipedia wrote:The mechanisms of CCD and the reasons for its increasing prevalence remain unclear, but many possible causes have been proposed: pesticides, primarily neonicotinoids; infections with Varroa and Acarapis mites; malnutrition; various pathogens; genetic factors; immunodeficiencies; loss of habitat; changing beekeeping practices; or a combination of factors.[9]
Orange causes are more indirectly related or more speculatively related, including increased exposure/less enzymatic breakdown, and changing the mediums for pathogens that bees are exposed to through food source replacement, inbreeding for production, etc.
Among those, loss of habitat and mites are pretty much the only things that seem unlikely to have any serious direct relation to honey harvesting (I could be wrong on that though).
Put up the proof that honey harvesting is harmless, or show me proof that honey is a health food. But in either case, the burden of proof lies on the honey advocates.Wikipedia wrote:A 2015 review examined 170 studies on colony collapse disorder and stressors for bees, including pathogens, agrochemicals, declining biodiversity, climate change and more. The review concluded that "a strong argument can be made that it is the interaction among parasites, pesticides, and diet that lies at the heart of current bee health problems."
