The world’s bee population is in crisis and Honey Nut Cheerios is coming to the rescue, minus its perky mascot.
The brand’s latest promotion, Bring Back The Bees, characterized as a cause marketing campaign, purports to inform Canadians about the global instability of bees, due to diseases, pesticides, flowerless landscapes and monolithic crop planting, and encourage them to plant 35 million bee-enticing wildflowers this spring.
Cereal lovers will find the brand’s longtime ambassador awol for the next six weeks.
“We took Buzz off the front of the box to bring awareness to fact the bees are disappearing and on the back we have a lot of information to help consumers understand why bees are important and what they can do and then driving them to the website so they can get their free seeds,” said Amanda Hsueh, Associate Marketing Director at General Mills Canada.
Recipients are encouraged to plant the wildflower seeds “anywhere where flowers would help beautify the space and make it a bee-friendly area,” she said.
“They provide not just honey, like in our Honey Nut Cheerios, but a third of our food supply actually depends on their pollination, such as, almonds, apples and even coffee.
“So they’re very important, but the bees are in trouble. We felt like we wanted to do something to help and we wanted to find a way to make sure all Canadians could do something to help.”
Thats all well and good but if they actually care about bees they would stop using honey in their product instead of just making a ~green~ marketing campaign
Producing honey does not hurt bees. Bee keepers ensure that bees live long, healthy lives. They always leave bees enough honey to live and maintain their colony. Without bee keepers the world would have much less bees and therefore much less healthy food (that vegans depend on).
You can disagree on the consumption of honey, but please come up with a better excuse than its harmful for bees, because its not.
ugh omg honey shaming is one of my biggest pet peeves
USING HONEY DOES NOT HURT BEES
Using honey ensures that bees are being (well)-kept and encouraged to propagate. You have to be very careful with your bees if you want them to give you quality products.
Using honey puts more money into the honey industry, allowing beekeepers to keep more bees as well as do more to help, protect, and save bees.
Conversely, if you stop using honey, not only is honey going to go to waste (bees produce more honey than they need), but people who currently keep bees are going to either turn to a different product (whether because want to make money or because they just can’t afford to keep the bees they love). Their bees are going to end up neglected and/or exterminated, and there will be fewer people contributing to the desperate conservation efforts.
I get that you want to be nature-friendly but please educate yourself on what that actually means before jumping into every argument you see.
Beekeepers who can’t make enough money selling honey have to send their beehives out to pollinate crops.
Travelling for pollination, incidentally, is much harder on bees than harvesting from one location year-round.
So if vegans want to avoid bee cruelty, they should stop eating all crops pollinated by bees. Here’s a convenient list:
Kiwis, watermelons, squash, zucchini, cashews, cucumbers, apples, mangos, avocados, plums, almonds, peaches, pears, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.
Only buy those crops from farmers who hand-pollinate their crops, like some farms in China now have to do. Keep in mind that thin upper boughs of fruit trees are flimsy, so they send children up to pollinate the top branches. Child labour in agriculture is another complicated subject, and one that I don’t think vegans even think twice about.
“Cruelty-free” is completely impossible, and people with a poor understanding of animal welfare tend to worsen it. Research how bees actually live and how beekeeping works and realize that there is zero harm done to bees by responsibly harvesting their honey.
(Note: I am a vegan who has kept bees and now eats locally-produced honey.)
Quick addition: honeybees are one of the species of bees not as at risk as others and that’s because of beekeepers. Cheerios is using a honeybee to draw attention to the issue, but their business is not affected by a shortage of honeybees, it’s affected by the endangerment of other pollinators and the risk that poses to cereal crops in the future.
Bees are not endangered because we eat honey. Bees are endangered because we spray crops with pesticides and we pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere which warms our climate and drives them out of their habitats. Bees are endangered because we focus on monoculture and we raze entire ecosystems for development projects. There are a million other reasons that bees are at risk that have nothing to do with eating honey.
Honey Nut Cheerios loses bee mascot on cereal boxes temporarily
eirenical17 