4 ms·

Wow. I'm prepared for seeing, in my lifetime, the day when bananas are gone: no more, done, only a memory. I'm prepared for seeing bees gone: no more, done, ho

Wow. I'm prepared for seeing, in my lifetime, the day when bananas are gone: no more, done, only a memory. I'm prepared for seeing bees gone: no more, done, honey doesn't exist now. It had not occurred to me that I might live to see a day when FISH were not a thing.

afandian 6y ago
Fish have been in trouble for a long time. Eg collapse of cod 30 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_nor...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Digit-Al 6y ago
If the bees went it would be a lot more serious than no more honey. It would cause the total collapse of a significant chunk of the ecosystem.
bserge 6y ago
Well, it's the only species that is mostly hunted (as opposed to farmed), so it shouldn't be that surprising. What's that about honey? I can send you pure, natural, seasonal (tastes different depending on month/flowers) honey anytime. We've got more than we can sell every year. ~5-10 Euro/L. Expanding on that, it's really strange how expensive and poor tasting honey is in western Europe. The normal cheap stuff (still expensive imo) is the usual mix of everything, just tastes sweet/bland, none of the spring/summer/autumn tastes that I'm used to. It's not like it goes bad (it does saccharize after a while though), there's an oversupply in eastern Europe, how come no one is importing it en masse? Strange, to say the least. Perhaps there's a good business opportunity there.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  https://www.vice.com/en/article/884kq4/your-fancy-honey-might-not-actually-be-honey https://www.vice.com/en/article/884kq4/your-fancy-honey-migh... > Grab any random bottle of honey from your kitchen, coffee shop, or restaurant: According to a number of honey experts who spoke with VICE, the odds are high that your honey isn't what it claims to be. Honey imported from overseas is often adulterated—either by having sugars added to it or by being cleaned, heated, or filtered—and then is blended with small amounts of true honey until the sticky substance is uniform. > In a small experiment of my own, I bought honey from different stores to test them at two different honey labs. In half of the samples I sent to a lab in Germany, and more than half of those I sent to a lab in Missouri, the results indicated adulteration may have taken place.
  - bserge 6y ago
    Oh wow, what the hell. It's not enough to just blend all the honey into one, they add sweeteners and filler? Must be really profitable, I guess. Heating, I can understand, it's a way to re-liquify crystallized honey. It's done at a low temperature over some time, so the taste remains mostly the same. Fresh honey straight out of the hive is the best, though. Now I wonder if people would even buy real, untouched honey. It's less viscous than the usual stuff in stores, and it crystallizes/hardens after a while, so it may actually seem fake, but that's natural honey.
    - msrenee 6y ago
      Grocery store honey crystallizes too. What I've found is that people who grew up on cheap honey just don't know what they're missing. Once they try the good stuff, they're ruined for the national brands.
      - quesera 6y ago
        See also: maple syrup. And of course EVOO.
  - msrenee 6y ago
    The honey in the grocery store has nothing on real honey either. It just tastes like corn syrup to me. There's a store here that sells honey from local bee keepers and it blew my mind the first time I had it after using Sue Bee all my life. Now a friend of mine has a hive. Her first harvest this spring is the best honey I've ever tasted. Here's hoping next year's is just as good. She ended up getting a number of small jars of exotic honey from some famous name in the bee world. There was honey from bees that gathered from peppercorn flowers, mustard flowers, those wild African hives that you have to gather from inside trees, honey from the side of a cliff. Just crazy things like that. We had a little tasting party, it was a blast. But her honey was better than any of those. And she left me some bits of honeycomb in there because I like to chew on it. I'm so spoiled for honey. Grocery store honey is like drinking bud lite when you want a nice wheat beer.

afandian 6y ago

Fish have been in trouble for a long time. Eg collapse of cod 30 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_nor...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Digit-Al 6y ago

If the bees went it would be a lot more serious than no more honey. It would cause the total collapse of a significant chunk of the ecosystem.

bserge 6y ago

Well, it's the only species that is mostly hunted (as opposed to farmed), so it shouldn't be that surprising. What's that about honey? I can send you pure, natural, seasonal (tastes different depending on month/flowers) honey anytime. We've got more than we can sell every year. ~5-10 Euro/L. Expanding on that, it's really strange how expensive and poor tasting honey is in western Europe. The normal cheap stuff (still expensive imo) is the usual mix of everything, just tastes sweet/bland, none of the spring/summer/autumn tastes that I'm used to. It's not like it goes bad (it does saccharize after a while though), there's an oversupply in eastern Europe, how come no one is importing it en masse? Strange, to say the least. Perhaps there's a good business opportunity there.

ceejayoz 6y ago
https://www.vice.com/en/article/884kq4/your-fancy-honey-might-not-actually-be-honey https://www.vice.com/en/article/884kq4/your-fancy-honey-migh... > Grab any random bottle of honey from your kitchen, coffee shop, or restaurant: According to a number of honey experts who spoke with VICE, the odds are high that your honey isn't what it claims to be. Honey imported from overseas is often adulterated—either by having sugars added to it or by being cleaned, heated, or filtered—and then is blended with small amounts of true honey until the sticky substance is uniform. > In a small experiment of my own, I bought honey from different stores to test them at two different honey labs. In half of the samples I sent to a lab in Germany, and more than half of those I sent to a lab in Missouri, the results indicated adulteration may have taken place.
- bserge 6y ago
  Oh wow, what the hell. It's not enough to just blend all the honey into one, they add sweeteners and filler? Must be really profitable, I guess. Heating, I can understand, it's a way to re-liquify crystallized honey. It's done at a low temperature over some time, so the taste remains mostly the same. Fresh honey straight out of the hive is the best, though. Now I wonder if people would even buy real, untouched honey. It's less viscous than the usual stuff in stores, and it crystallizes/hardens after a while, so it may actually seem fake, but that's natural honey.
  - msrenee 6y ago
    Grocery store honey crystallizes too. What I've found is that people who grew up on cheap honey just don't know what they're missing. Once they try the good stuff, they're ruined for the national brands.
    - quesera 6y ago
      See also: maple syrup. And of course EVOO.
- msrenee 6y ago
  The honey in the grocery store has nothing on real honey either. It just tastes like corn syrup to me. There's a store here that sells honey from local bee keepers and it blew my mind the first time I had it after using Sue Bee all my life. Now a friend of mine has a hive. Her first harvest this spring is the best honey I've ever tasted. Here's hoping next year's is just as good. She ended up getting a number of small jars of exotic honey from some famous name in the bee world. There was honey from bees that gathered from peppercorn flowers, mustard flowers, those wild African hives that you have to gather from inside trees, honey from the side of a cliff. Just crazy things like that. We had a little tasting party, it was a blast. But her honey was better than any of those. And she left me some bits of honeycomb in there because I like to chew on it. I'm so spoiled for honey. Grocery store honey is like drinking bud lite when you want a nice wheat beer.