Stumbling into controversies
There could be something interesting to say about the whole US healthcare saga ... though I'm sure that others are covering it well elsewhere. I don't see a lot of meeting of minds so far in the blog comments I've seen - supporters of the NHS post in one place, detractors another (usually). Having had the UK decried on account of the NHS, the release of Megrahi seems to be the big bugbear at the moment. Apparently the plan is to stop drinking Whisky and visiting Scotland. Will they stop playing golf too?
I stumbled across another "great debate" in the last couple of days. The government is keen to encourage urban dwellers to take up beekeeping and I was interested to see what it involved. I've already been lent someone's daughter's school project(!) as an introduction but I've been looking around the web ... and this was where I stumbled across another controversy. I came across a couple of analyses) of the Vegan Society's position paper on honey(unfortunately references give a 404!). There were also numerous forum postings where people battle out whether beekeeping is necessarily exploitative. Presumably, if one kept hives to maintain populations and pollination, but threw away the excess honey[*] and didn't eat it, that wouldn't be exploitation?
I'm not vegan (I am vegetarian but now as a matter of habit/taste/discipline more than principle) so maybe it's not surprising that I've missed out on all theheated forum threads... Do I need heated discussions? Probably not!
[*] It appears that some amount of free space needs to be maintained in a hive to prevent the queen running out of cells in which to lay eggs - if the queen swarms the likelihood of the swarmed colony surviving long-term is lower.
I stumbled across another "great debate" in the last couple of days. The government is keen to encourage urban dwellers to take up beekeeping and I was interested to see what it involved. I've already been lent someone's daughter's school project(!) as an introduction but I've been looking around the web ... and this was where I stumbled across another controversy. I came across a couple of analyses) of the Vegan Society's position paper on honey(unfortunately references give a 404!). There were also numerous forum postings where people battle out whether beekeeping is necessarily exploitative. Presumably, if one kept hives to maintain populations and pollination, but threw away the excess honey[*] and didn't eat it, that wouldn't be exploitation?
I'm not vegan (I am vegetarian but now as a matter of habit/taste/discipline more than principle) so maybe it's not surprising that I've missed out on all theheated forum threads... Do I need heated discussions? Probably not!
[*] It appears that some amount of free space needs to be maintained in a hive to prevent the queen running out of cells in which to lay eggs - if the queen swarms the likelihood of the swarmed colony surviving long-term is lower.