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