athousanderrors

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itd-be-gay-if-you-didnt:

captain-seahorse:

Found on FB

*******PLEASE DON’T LEAVE DISHES OF SUGAR WATER OUT*******

Post from a beekeeper

Oh dear - I keep hearing tips about leaving bowls of sugar water out to “help” keep bees hydrated. Please, please, please DON’T. Bees are really good at finding what they need and there are so many reasons not to do this. The MOST IMPORTANT reason is that if you within 3 miles of some hives (and most people are) if the bees find the sugar water they’re going to think its a great source of easy food, go back to the hive and recruit more bees to come and collect the “food” and before you know it you’ll have 1.000s and 1,000s of bees descending on your garden/balcony - a very scary sight. This is known as robbing and as beekeeper I’ve seen this a couple of times - once started it is impossible to stop until the source of the “food” has gone.

Other reasons not to do this are - sugar water is essentially “junk” food for bees. Its full of carbohydrates which will give them an energy burst, but has no other nutritional value unlike the food they should be having i.e. nectar.

Honey bees will store this as honey in the hive. The beekeeper unknowingly may end up extracting and selling this as honey later in the year. You don’t want to buy sugar syrup and the beekeeper doesn’t want to be prosecuted for selling a product which isn’t honey.

This is also an easy food source for social wasps.

By all means give a tired bee a drink of sugar water on a spoon, but please don’t leave it out for them.

If you want to help bees there are lots of ways you can do this from planting nectar rich plants or leaving out bowls of water with gravel/small pebbles in so they can access the water which they would be very grateful for.

PLEASE SHARE THIS AND TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS

Edited - It appears that a lot of the advice I have seen about leaving out sugar water stems from advice from DAVID ATTENBOROUGH. He was absolutely right in his advice, but his advice was if you see a struggling bee to put some sugar water where the bee could reach it - not to leave out bowls of sugar water. Unfortunately it seems like, as usual, media publications have misquoted advice and not done their research

Also please don’t feed bees honey. Surprisingly they don’t eat honey - they eat nectar. Honey bees make honey for their own use during the winter months, but bumble bees collect and use nectar as and when they need it.

Feeding honey can spread disease between bees.

Reblog for a tired bee
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exqueensofbael:

spinelsong:

bees do not suffer from humans harvesting their honey, as they produce it to a level of excess that they cannot hope to use.

not only that, but without people deliberately breeding them for honey, they would have died out by now.

this especially goes towards you vegans who don’t eat honey thinking it’s animal abuse. don’t go out and buy agave nectar, which is so frequently made using inhuman labour policies. use honey, the best way to save bees.

The overharvesting of agave is actually harming the animals that naturally feed off the plants such as certain types of bat. Protesting honey is killing bees and harming the livelihood of beekeepers, aka people who chose their job, not who were forced into it.
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16 oz of honey requires 1152 bees to travel 112,000 miles and visit 4.5 million flowers.

Most of the honey we get at supermarkets and stores don’t come from natural hives. 

Honey is an animal product, produced when bees digest nectar they have collected and then regurgitate it. It is an animal product, just like an egg or milk. Yes, a bee is an insect and not technically considered an animal by many people, but a bee’s body changes the composition of what it ingests, just like other animals.
However, there is another reason vegans won’t eat honey, and that is because it is harmful to another living creature. According to Daniel Hammer, bees do experience pain and suffering while they are being exploited for their products (not just honey but also beeswax, royal jelly, and more). There is simply no way beekeepers, humane or otherwise, can avoid harming or killing bees while they are extracting the bees’ products. Many vegans choose their lifestyle because they wish to avoid harming any other creature, and so they choose not to eat honey.

Check out this couple of articles that are pretty complete about everything around this topic :) 

Why Honey is Not Vegan?

3 Reasons Not to Eat Honey > This one explain about the environmental damage and how we are killing the bees.