Digest Ivan Pechanec said: > One of the comments was the some people won't eat honey > because the worker bees are oppressed. This sounds more like a strict "vegan" than a vegetarian. Vegans can be strange people. They are mostly emaciated unhealthy-looking folks who seem to have constant colds, and never accept my invitations to run with me on my daily 5K. (Hehehe, I pull that one on everyone who is a health nut of any variety. Funny how none accept the offer.) My circles of friends include a few radical vegans who dress entirely in black, live in Greenwich Village, engage in long discussions about the writings of Marcel Prost, and make a living in the "arts" as in "performance artists" or art dealers. I first became aware of "vegans and honey" when my wife deleted several names from the list of people I was sending 3-lb jars of honey along with their Christmas cards. Their point of view starts with the perfectly rational statement that vegans do not eat ANY animal products or by-products, and bees are clearly animals. I have no problem with someone who chooses to live (and eat) a certain way, and I can even prepare an appropriate menu when a party includes a dinner guest who wishes to "eat macrobiotic". No big hairy deal. BUT, the more radical-fascists among vegans seem to want to politicize everything, and try to convert others to their way of thinking. This thinking is a mix of semi-accurate observations and fuzzy thinking, as follows: a) Artificial insemination of queens is "rape" to vegans. b) Re-queening is murder to vegans. c) Manipulations intended to prevent swarming means that beekeepers are "keeping the bees prisoner" in the eyes of vegans. (It matters not to them that swarms would likely not survive in the wild for long...) d) The vegans have done their homework, and have latched onto the rare practice of killing off a colony in fall in the far north, where overwintering is so difficult. They have also latched onto the misguided idea that killing off every fall and starting from packages every spring makes "economic sense", and therefore think that it is much more common than it is. e) Vegans do not understand "combining colonies", and think that this always results in one queen being killed by the other. f) The harvesting of honey is "stealing", since it makes the bees work harder and longer. Feeding syrup to bees is also terrible, because it is a "poor replacement" for what the bees "should be eating", in the view of vegans, and sugar is also verboten for vegans (something about animal bone being used in the processing of sugar, I do not recall, due to my eyes having glazed over and my mind started wandering by the time this point was reached when I asked a vegan about honey at a charity benefit one evening.) g) Even the movable-frame hives are "unnatural prisons", since the vegans feel that stationary comb is what the bees "want". h) Vegans also want to blame beekeepers for their winter colony losses, not understanding that we feel badly about this ourselves, and don't like it either. I list more points, but you get the idea, and to be honest, my brain overheated and seized up after listening to this sort of drivel for a while, so I'm not sure I remember. jim