I was aware of how commercial beekeepers exploit bees, particularly how they drive the hives around in trucks for miles to pollinate crops, stressing the bees and probably contributing to the massive die-off we've been reading about, but I wasn't aware of the other bee practices.

It doesn't bother me to think of honey as "bee vomit", but I personally don't eat honey because of the problem with blood sugar that I have--I don't eat any sweetener, as a matter of fact, organic or no. I've known since my kids were born that babies should not be fed honey until they are two years old because it could cause problems with their immune system--can't remember what now. The energy worker/healer I go to has long told me that honey is a medicinal and is NOT to be eaten on a regular basis as "food" because it can cause health problems. as a medicinal, it is to be used in homeopathic doses.

I don't buy silk clothes anymore (not that I bought it very often because of the expense) because of the exploitation of silk worms that make the silk--silk is marketed as a "natural" fabric but how the worms are treated in large commercial silk factories is pretty horrible--the silk worms spin their cocoons, then the cocoons are boiled to kill the worm inside before they can hatch as moths. This insures that the cocoon silk will be unbroken and better suited to making silk thread (if a moth is allowed to hatch, it naturally breaks a hole in the cocoon in order to exit).

Seems that humans don't have much regard for animal life, no matter what form that animal life takes.

Blessings,

Liora

read below about silk worms I found on google--very interesting about the "Wild" silk from caterpillars...sounds like a good alternative for silk lovers

from:
http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=1000530254&tstart=0&mod=11849...




Silk is a natural protein fiber, some forms of which can be woven into textiles. The best-known type of silk is obtained from cocoons made by the larvae of the silkworm Bombyx mori reared in captivity (sericulture). The shimmering appearance for which silk is prized comes from the fibers' triangular prism-like structure which allows silk cloth to refract incoming light at different angles.

"Wild silks" or tussah silks (also spelled "tasar") are produced by caterpillars other than the mulberry silkworm (Bombyx mori). They are called "wild" as the silkworms cannot be artificially cultivated like Bombyx mori. A variety of wild silks have been known and used in China, India, and Europe from early times, although the scale of production has always been far smaller than that of cultivated silks. Aside from differences in colors and textures, they all differ in one major aspect from the domesticated varieties: the cocoons that are gathered in the wild have usually already been damaged by the emerging moth before the cocoons are gathered, and thus the single thread that makes up the cocoon has been torn into shorter lengths. Commercially reared silkworm pupae are killed before the adult moths emerge by dipping them in boiling water or piercing them with a needle, thus allowing the whole cocoon to be unraveled as one continuous thread. This allows a much stronger cloth to be woven from the silk. Wild silks also tend to be more difficult to dye than silk from the cultivated silkworm.