Skalicia

If the stairs don't get you, the stove will.

vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it

vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects

Honey is literally murder but go off

Prove it.

They literally puke their guts up to make your honey

I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.

Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.

Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey

This is the funniest thing I’ve ever read

@zoologicallyobsessed please show us pics of your bee grinder

they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom. 

…do they think they put bees in that and spin them around until they vomit…?

bee carnival

bad and naughty bees get put into the b e e c e n t r i f u g e to extract their honey

Vegans coming after beekeepers is one of my major teeth grinding annoyances. For many reasons, because there’s so many lies. And to go one step further because it’s such a waste. You see, the strongest vegan argument is that they don’t want to exploit animals or take from them without their consent.

… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.

How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.

The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.

Of all the animals we have domesticated as livestock, bees are the ones you can most easily argue are consenting participants in their keeping.

Here it is. The bee post is back

I feel compelled to explain the misconception part for anyone who doesn’t know anything about beekeeping and finds any of this confusing. This might be a little redundant, but I’m scratching an itch.

Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.

When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.

So.

It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.

Like, there’s no need to have a conversation about this, anyone who claims that harvesting honey requires that you kill bees is lying. Either they don’t know anything about beekeeping and are just repeating a lie someone else told them, or they know that they’re lying and they’re just straight up trying to deceive people. Neither is a good look.

And just one more point of clarification – “cells of the hive” doesn’t mean the anatomical cells of the bees’ bodies, it means the little holes in the honeycomb of the physical structure of the hives, which they build using beeswax. Think of it like a bee pantry. They put their honey in the pantry, but since they’re working hard every day, they often make wayyyyyy too much of it. So the beekeepers come along and take the extra honeycomb that the bees don’t need and aren’t going to use, but they leave plenty behind for the bees to eat. Additionally, if anything happens to the hive’s honey supplies in the winter, the beekeepers can supplement their food by either giving some honey back or giving them sugar water. Also, fun fact! When beekeepers extract the honey from the comb, they often leave all their equipment out afterwards so the bees can come along and clean up, re-collecting any traces of honey or wax left behind, which get put back into the hive and recycled. Any leftover waste (dirt and grime from old comb, for example, or bees that died natural deaths of old age) makes great fertilizer for the plants that produce the pollen the bees make next year. No waste!

Vegans, the bees are not going to stop making honey if they’re left to their own devices in the wild. The bees are just doing a thing that bees do. Eating honey is not exploitation, it’s sustainability. That said, if you’re still worried about the ethics, I’d recommend looking up some local beekeepers/honey farms in your area and reaching out to them for more education! I’ve known a lot of beekeepers that are really excited about doing education and outreach to teach people about the importance of pollinators, the partnership between bees and beekeepers, and the process of how honey is collected. Some honey farms will even give you a tour of their process so you can see in person how it’s made and that it’s not a harmful or exploitative process for the bees at all! (and of course eating local honey gives you an amazing connection to your local environment, both spiritually and physically?? like apparently eating local honey can help with seasonal allergies??? it’s really cool)

Honey is mostly made of nectar, not pollen, but otherwise this is accurate. (Bees do also store and eat pollen, and some pollen does wind up in the honey.)

Personal anecdote time: My grandfather was a beekeeper, and when he wound up in the hospital his last week alive, nobody thought to check up on his bees until a few days after he died. For most domesticated animals, being entirely neglected like that would be a death sentence. For the bees? They were fine, because they had the same access to food and water they’d always had, because you do not enclose bees. My grandfather, like many beekeepers, planted a huge garden around his hives specifically for them to harvest nectar from (honey from different plants tastes different, so the best way to get a certain flavor is to make certain plants readily available to the bees), so until the neglect started affecting the plants, they still had more food there than anywhere else nearby they could have lived. Even so, eventually they swarmed and left. The weird friendly giant who kept their hive safe from predators and diseases was gone, and food was less abundant. Thus it was no longer an ideal place to live. So they stopped living there. That’s what bees do if they’re not happy with their living arrangements, and there is no feasible way to stop them.

Bees do what they want, and in the case of the domestic honeybee, what they want is a free house perfectly designed for their needs, a garden/grocery store that surrounds their house in every direction so they’re never more than a minute away from it, and a security guard and live-in physician so effective that it *pays for itself several times over* in the honey they wouldn’t have been able to make without it, because that honey would have been stolen by bears and/or the workers that made it would have been dead.

When I was younger and researching the autism diagnosis criteria and symptoms, I thought “oh I couldn’t POSSIBLY be autistic.” Because when I read “takes everything literally” I thought it literally meant EVERYTHING and I was like “I don’t take EVERYTHING literally, just most things!” And I just realized the other day that it didn’t actually mean EVERYTHING and that was an overstatement.

#these tests always do shit like this#and its just like why would you phrase it like this when its specifically a symptom to misinterpret this (via @tbhliteraltrash )

ok hold on actually i rb'd this before with just tags but im going to come back in on this again

any medical diagnostic you will ever undergo does not mean "always 100% Every Time Ever you have this problem". And it sucks because they will phrase it in a way that SOUNDS like 100% Every Time including on the testing for being a person who has trouble with how specific phrasing is supposed to be.

literally the example I always use is I spent way longer without glasses then I should have because the eyesight chart diagnostic is "identify the letter", so I went 'ok the point of this is to do good identifying letters'. Then i realized

they want to know if I can see. Not if I can identify that a blurry shape is an A because of its unique outline.

So i started qualifying my answers with "blurry". Blurry A, Blurry Y, Blurry Z. Now I have glasses.

they do not make this clear. I do not know why. But you can more or less apply this to any medical diagnostic, and if it's a written diagnostic if your answer is 'sometimes' and the only answers are 'yes or no' you put Yes.

Do I have trouble getting out of bed? Sometimes, yes. So the answer is Yes.

Regrettably tests are made for and by non-autistic people and aimed at non-autistic caregivers and medical experts, which isnt how it should be, and makes it one more complicated thing to navigate. World a hell.

all goofing aside I genuinely don't understand the urge to reimagine Taylor Allison Swift as a secretly queer icon when the pop music scene(TM) is like. literally overflowing with women who actually like women. Gaga and Kesha and Miley and Halsey are right there. Rina Sawayama and Hayley Kiyoko and Rebecca Black and Kehlani and Victoria Monét and Miya Folick if you're willing to get slightly less top 100. Janelle and Demi for them nonbinary takes on liking girls. like what are we doing here. like I'm not even saying you can't enjoy Taylor but why would you hang all your little gay hopes on her.

Isn’t Lady Gaga bisexual?

yes that is indeed why she's on the list of famous women who like women

why have multiple people reblogged this with some horse-assed "um actually most of these people are bi or pan" did I fucking stutter I said they like girls. what is your point. I'm going to kill you.

#op probably has this post muted but the icon is too real.

the icon is because of this post

POV: you make a good post and then encounter tumblr reading comprehension

btw to just clarify for anyone who sees this reblog of this post

op is basically saying something along the lines of "yea ik taylor swift is bi but like. why is she y'all's only lgbtq+ pop icon when there are all these other lgbtq+ people in the pop scene???"

i might have worded this badly but hopefully i got the main point across

hi op here I certainly did not fucking say Taylor Swift is bi

Op is saying that liking Taylor for being QUEER or Lgbtqia+ is not a bad thing, but to also know she is not the only one.

He did not call anyone in the original post lesbian bi or pan.

He did call two people NB

you have to be fucking with me there's no way

#Op you gonna have to make a graph

on it:

little thingy from the other week, stuff on my mind

any time i feel like shit i just rewatch the vid of those people in new york reacting to sans undertale being confirmed for smash. like the exact second megalovania starts you can see all stages of grief diluted into dionysian ecstasy. it's Incredible

humanity will never reach this level of joy again

THIS

is the NASA mission control team for the 1969 moon landing

THOSE SANS LOVING TURBO NERDS LOOK HAPPIER THAN THE DUDES WHO WON THE SACE RACE!!

[transcription of a reddit comment]

ew72 • 19 hr. ago

I'm a type 1 diabetic. I require insulin to live, multiple times a day.

When I was in middle school, many years ago, we didn't have insulin pumps and had to use syringes and vials like everyone else.

The school refused to let me carry it with me, meaning I had to go to the nurses office several times a day to inject. It's not just before lunch but could be any number of times depending on the current blood sugar levels.

The district then cut nurse staff to just spending half a day at two schools, and the nurse left before I had lunch.

I asked the office staff to unlock the office so I could take my insulin and eat lunch. They refused.

By middle school, I'd been dealing with t1 for about 5 years, and didn't take shit on the topic. I went to the school lobby, picked up the payphone (I just dated myself) and called 911, telling them, "Hi, I'm at (school), am type 1 diabetic and the office won't unlock a door and let me take insulin."

They sent a fire truck, and a bunch of firemen met me outside and walked me to the office and asked, while ignoring the staff, which room was the nurses office. I pointed to the door and he was like, "Okay boys, chop it down, this kid need his insulin!"

Suddenly, the office secretary could unlock the door and I didn't need to put it in the nurses office everyday anymore.

End id.]

god forbid he sit like a normal person nightmare by jokublog

Some of you have never shipped a rare pair and it shows.

Some of you have never invented a rarepair, written the only fic for it, and then wallowed alone in your special mud pit of crack pairings and it shows

OP: 我觉得你们俩有点暧昧了

↳ I feel like you two have some ambiguity going

English added by me :)

i think it's fucked up that there are plants that decided they wanted to eat meat

a plant's job is literally to just exist but the venus flytrap chose violence

what if i gently laid an uncooked steak on the soil for it to absorb

my tree biology teacher fed her calcium-deficient tree a whole-ass bbq rib bone - she stuck it in the ground near the base of the tree (after eating the meat off of it), and when she came back to collect it to show the tree biology class it was GONE

the tree had grown a root up through the center of it & out through the sides

also there’s an old story about a man who was buried beneath a tree, and when they went to exhume the body it had been completely absorbed by the tree’s roots- you could see the shape of the body in the way the roots grew, splitting up for clearly defined arms and legs. trees will absolutely eat a steak if you bury it & they need the nutrients.

that’s horrifying! thank you

I mean yeah? Bone meal and blood meal are common fertilizers for plants.

And plants' roots actively forage, seeking out the areas of the most nutrients as they grow, so it makes sense

"What are corpses on the ground but uncooked steaks for some tree" is my new favorite quote

Nightmare sent them to pick you up-

after the news about duolingo shifting to AI generated translations and only using human staff to check that the translations were bare minimum “acceptable” I switched my german lessons to busuu and I’ve only been doing it a month but it already feels like a more helpful interface. there’s typically way more german text onscreen than there is english (e.g. the headers and lesson instructions being in german), they use more complex compound words that start becoming recognizable in context, they give WAY more detailed explanations of grammar rules, and occasionally there’s a written short answer you submit to get feedback from other real users who are fluent. I don’t think they offer as wide a range of languages but if anyone is looking to jump ship from duolingo I’d recommend checking them out

they used to make smackable technology. you used to be able to hit your tv when it didn't work good.

“vampirism is too romanticized these days” damn that’s crazy. I’m romanticizing it even more now though because you’re whining like this

AND sexualizing it. this is your fault btw