Category: General

overachieversloth:

carazelaya:

spaggel:

Not many of my followers know, but I’m a bartender and after this weekend (and for the last 5 years) I thought I’d make a quick a simple list of bar manners to mind.

• If you use a lime after a shot do not stick your gross ass chewed up lime on the bar. Put it back into the shot glass, on a napkin or find a trash can for the love of god. 
• If you don’t want a straw in your drink, either say so when you order or put in on a napkin or throw it away. Again, do not stick it in your mouth, suck on it and leave your spit straw on the counter. Have you no manners?
• Don’t yell. Use your manners.
• I know it looks like I will never look into your beautiful, drink starved eyes, but I can see you even if I’m not looking at you. Trust me. 
• If I am not looking at you, I’m not taking your order.

  If I look at your eyes, that’s a sign that I’m ready to take your order. Which I am not, so don’t wave your hand in front of my face to make me look at you. I might forget what I’m doing an take even longer. You’re only hurting yourself.

• If you are ordering multiple drinks, order them all at once. Not one at a time. You get your drinks faster and everyone around you can get served faster as well. It’s a win-win.
• I don’t care what you drink, honestly. Like, drink a long island. Or a lemon drop. It makes my gut hurt because sugar. But I Don’t Care. And neither should you, so don’t make shitty comments the person next to you when they order. 
• Unless you’re putting red bull in grey goose. Save yourself some cash and just get well vodka. 
• I take it back, there was one time someone ordered a pint glass of half & half and a shot of malibu rum in it and I thought i was going to die.
• If I ask you if you want a back/chaser for your shot I’m not questioning your masculinity or giving you a test. I just want to know. It’s easier to do it all at once.
• I don’t know that one special drink at another bar, but tell me what you like about it and I’ll try to find you an alternative. 
• Please. Please don’t ask me to just pour you whatever. Especially when it’s busy. I have to hold back the urge to pour you a shot of grape pucker and call it a day.
• If you ask me for a “girly” or “pussy” drink I will pour you fernet branca because I am both girly, in possession of a vagina and that’s all I drink. You’ll regret it.
• If you order something gay I will pour you whiskey because that’s what all my gay male friends drink. They also drink fernet as well. It’s a toss up there. 
• In fact. I serve women, gay men/women and straight dudes all about the same when it comes to whiskey. It’s strange how gender and sexuality have nothing to do with the types of alcohol you drink.
• The correct terminology you are looking for is “fruity” or “mixed” 
• Anyway. Someone once asked for both. After I responded with fernet to his “pussy” shot request, he ordered a “gay” shot.
• So I told him I’d make him a gay shot called a dick in his mouth.
• I did. 
• He told me it was “a little stiff”
• I told him if there’s a dick in his mouth, you better hope it’s stiff.

this is the post i’ve been waiting for

#but if it’s not busy#always learn your bartender’s name#always tip#always look them in the eyes#and always know what the fuck you want before you’re up there

shadesofmauve:

Step 1: This doesn’t work lik I expect it to…

Step 2: But it totally works! OMG, this is awesome! I’ll have drawn my dreamhouse by lunchtime! I’m gonna make SO MANY COOL THINGS!

Step 3: Oops, a small problem! I’m sure I’ll be able to fix it easily with my new knowledge of this marvelous software!

Step 4: EVERYTHING IS BROKEN FOR EVER AND EVERY STEP I THOUGHT WAS FORWARD WAS A STEP TOWARD THE FLAMING ABYSS AND ALL MISTAKES MUST BE CORRECTED BY STARTING FROM SCRATCH, GOD DAMNIT WHERE IS THE TUTORIAL ON ROOSTER SACRIFICE SO I CAN MAKE MY DAMN MODEL WORK

Ah, I see you’ve reached a similar stage to me…

Anonymous:

Is using honey bad? It would be hard for me to give that up because I love it so much.

tkingfisher:

chimericaloutlier:

tkingfisher:

perfectly-ultimate-great-shoofle:

vmprsm:

inquisitorhotpants:

velocicrafter:

veronica-rich:

systlin:

justkeepswimmingk:

give-a-fuck-about-nature:

systlin:

powrd-by-plants:

16 oz of honey requires 1152 bees to travel 112,000 miles and visit 4.5 million flowers.

Most of the honey we get at supermarkets and stores don’t come from natural hives. 

Honey is an animal product, produced when bees digest nectar they have collected and then regurgitate it. It is an animal product, just like an egg or milk. Yes, a bee is an insect and not technically considered an animal by many people, but a bee’s body changes the composition of what it ingests, just like other animals.

However, there is another reason vegans won’t eat honey, and that is because it is harmful to another living creature. According to Daniel Hammer, bees do experience pain and suffering while they are being exploited for their products (not just honey but also beeswax, royal jelly, and more). There is simply no way beekeepers, humane or otherwise, can avoid harming or killing bees while they are extracting the bees’ products. Many vegans choose their lifestyle because they wish to avoid harming any other creature, and so they choose not to eat honey.

Check out this couple of articles that are pretty complete about everything around this topic :) 

• Why Honey is Not Vegan?
• 3 Reasons Not to Eat Honey > This one explain about the environmental damage and how we are killing the bees.

As a beekeeper, let me say the following. 

As a vegan, you depend upon beekeeping. It doesn’t matter if you never use beeswax or eat honey. You still depend on beekeeping. It is absolutely impossible not to. 

Because here’s the secret; you know all those delicious fruits and vegetables you eat? You wouldn’t have them if it wasn’t for bees, and here’s another secret; those bees were probably either kept by the farmer who grew them for the purpose of pollinating his/her crops, or moved to the farm during pollination season by a beekeeper. 

If you’ve ever eaten a cherry, almond, blueberry, tomato, melon, squash, raspberry, strawberry…hell, most fruits or veggies…you’ve benefited from beekeeping. There is simply no way to avoid it. If you leave it up to whatever pollinators happen to stop in from the surrounding area, your yields will suffer dramatically, which means less produce and less money for the farmer. Therefore, the easy and universally preferred method is to plop a few hives on the property. The girls will make sure that just about every last almond/cherry/blueberry flower is pollinated (They’re VERY good at what they do) and you can happily harvest a bumper crop. This is a universally used practice among food producers. 

And do you know the best way to help make sure the bees survive?

Keep them. Organically, without using any chemicals. And here’s a secret about beekeeping; you inspect the hives whether or not you take honey, to make sure the bees are healthy and doing well. (There are mites and diseases that can severely harm bees, and even as an organic beekeeper who doesn’t use chemicals on her girls there are methods I use to prevent/treat things like varroa mite infestation that can kill an otherwise healthy hive).

And yes, when you open a hive to inspect it, you might crush one or two bees. But tell me, honestly, that you’ve never killed an insect. Bees themselves will kill sick/non productive members of the hive to ensure the health of the hive as a whole; I don’t see how my accidentally squishing one to ensure the health of the other 50,000 is any different. 

And this is what all beekeepers do. And if you, as before mentioned, ever eat anything that isn’t grain-based, this is what took place to put that food on your plate. 

I would also like to point out that bees will store as much honey as they possibly can…which usually ends up being waaaaay more than they actually can use. To survive a log Iowa winter, my bees need about 100 lbs of honey per hive. Well, last year one hive had TWICE that. (I took 50 pounds, leaving them MORE than enough to get through the winter. I just checked on them today; they’re alive and healthy). 

You are NOT hurting them by taking a little honey for yourself, no more than you already are by looking in on them every two or three weeks to make sure they’re healthy. 

And again, if you ever eat any fruits or veggies, SOMEONE IS ALREADY KEEPING BEES TO POLLINATE THEM AND INSPECTING THEM TO MAKE SURE THEY’RE HAPPY AND HEALTHY. 

KEEPING BEES IS NOT WHAT IS KILLING BEES IT IS WHAT IS SAVING BEES. 

WITHOUT BEES YOUR VEGAN DIET IS IMPOSSIBLE.

WITHOUT THAT “EVIL” EXPLOITATION OF BEES YOUR VEGAN DIET IS IMPOSSIBLE. 

AGAIN, BEEKEEPING IS WHAT IS SAVING BEES NOT KILLING THEM. 

SO IF YOU EAT A LITTLE HONEY IT IS HONESTLY NO WORSE THAN EATING SOME ALMONDS AND FRUIT SALAD. 

“Drops mic”

Why can’t bees be protected without taking the honey they produce? I’m all for their protection and I didn’t born yesterday, I know that without bees we all gonna die, but why is it mandatory to steal their honey?

Yeah, that made no sense… You can keep bees without stealing from them. You can keep horses without riding them. You can keep dogs without abusing them. Do people really not get this?

Again, you don’t seem to be getting this. 

Yes. You can keep bees without taking honey from them. But, as I said before, you’re ALREADY in the hive checking for diseases and pests. That, if anything, is what causes bees stress, not you taking a frame or two of honey (each frame of honey can hold 15 pounds!). 

Also, there’s a REASON you take honey from bees, not just because you want to eat it. 

See, like I said before, bees will store as much honey as they can. It’s instinctive. However, there’s only so much room in a hive to put stuff, and honey isn’t the only thing in a hive. They also need room to raise brood, store pollen, ect. Now, if they run out of room, they’ll start feeling overcrowded, which will trigger swarming activity. You can, of course, add more supers (boxes) to the hive, but there’s a limit on how many workers one queen can produce, and you don’t want more supers than they can police, even if all of them are stuffed full of honey. That way lies pests and raiding. So, what we want to do is make sure that they don’t feel overcrowded, while making sure that they don’t have more room than they can take care of. 

When bees feel overcrowded, they swarm. When they swarm, they raise a new queen. The old queen and half the bees will then leave to try and find someplace to start a new hive. 90% of swarms die. As a beekeeper, you don’t want this. 

You can, of course, purposefully let them start raising a new queen and then split a new hive off of the old one if you want to. I’ve done this myself. But this is not always desirable, for many reasons (no more room for more hives, can’t take care of more, don’t have a spare hive body on hand, ect.) There’s also the fact that a recently swarmed hive is susceptible to raiding by wasps/skunks (skunks LOVE to raid hives, the little bastards) or mice, as half the bees that would have defended it before are now gone. You don’t want this either; raiding can kill a hive as quick as disease or pests. (This is why I keep a VERY close eye on any hives that I’ve recently split, and have taken potshots at skunks in the backyard with a slingshot before. Not to kill them, just to scare them off.)

If you don’t want them to swarm, the easiest way to keep them from feeling cramped and give them a little new breathing room is to pull a few surplus honey frames they’ve filled up and replace them with empty frames. The girls will then happily go back to work filling the new empty frames with honey or brood or whatever they decide needs to go in all that new space. They don’t feel crowded any longer, the hive doesn’t swarm and stays strong, everyone’s happy. 

And what, then, am I supposed to do with these three frames of honey I pulled? Throw them away? Hell no. That’s 30-40 pounds of delicious, right there. 

Humans and bees have what’s called a symbiotic relationship. We both benefit from the arrangement. Don’t diss things if you don’t understand how they work. 

And, one more time…keeping bees is necessary for your vegan diet to remain viable. A beekeeper is going to inspect all of those hives anyway, which is the most stressful part of beekeeping for the bees. You are, with your eating habits, (and by that I mean ‘really just eating’, because there’s NO diet that doesn’t rely on beekeeping) reliant on this practice. Taking a frame or two of honey is the LEAST stressful part of inspecting a hive for the bees. 

Source; have kept bees organically for 10 years, help other hobbyists in the area who want to start keeping bees. Garden organically. Generally Actually Know Where My Food Comes From And What It Takes To Get It On My Plate. 

I understand some people want to be kind and compassionate. But there’s such a thing as being ignorantly compassionate, to the point where you forget how to do research, apparently.

I live for these defences of honey tbh

and the comments that give insight into beekeeping just make it better <3

bolding for emphasis:

“Humans and bees have what’s called a symbiotic relationship. We both
benefit from the arrangement. Don’t diss things if you don’t understand
how they work.”

reblogging for the INTELLIGENT support to beekeeping and honey harvesting.

people, i understand saying ‘save the bees’ but there is no ‘freeing the bees’. we (as beekeepers, i am one myself, have done bee research and have a masters in entomology) are not killing the bees, nor are we abusing them.

european honey bees, Apis mellifera, are literally only in the US and thriving because we brought them here. there are no wild european honey bees, only feral. they area  FULLY DOMESTICATED species, and yes, are symbiotically linked to humans, though it is a facultative relationship. beekeepers care for bees and really, honey harvesting is about one of the least stressful things to happen to bees. the few crushed during inspections? not even noticed by the hive at large because beehives are what we call a superorganism. crushing a single bee is the equivalent of killing a single cell in our bodies.

that isn’t to say that all honey bee operations are good, or should really be supported. i’m not a fan of huge pollination operations, where a company keeps thousands of hives and may not necessarily be doing whats best for the bees. but honey harvesting? not even on the radar for things that harm bees.

here’s the other thing: basically all honey alternatives rely on the exploitation of larger amounts of human labor

Honeybees need us. We need honeybees. Now, I am all for the appreciation of the work native North American bees (and flies and wasps and beetles and…) do to pollinate our crops, but that’s not an option in areas that don’t have a healthy native bee population, and some plants, often from areas where honeybees evolved, just plain like honeybees to do their pollinating.

Look, at the end of the day, domestic species, plant and animal, have thrown their lot in with us. You can’t release a milk cow into the wild while humming a few bars from “Born Free” and expect it to turn back into an aurochs. Stop harvesting corn and you don’t get wild corn, you get nothing, because it can’t reseed without human help. We’re stuck with each other now. You can do any thought experiment you like about how maybe those species shouldn’t have been domesticated in the first place, but that ship has SAILED, my friend.

We’re all in this together.

Hey, every time *I’ve* released a cow into the wild humming “Born Free” it has turned into an aurochs! Of course every time I hum or sing “Born Free” all the objects around me turn into aurochs…es. It’s starting to become a problem.

You should probably see a doctor about that. Or a priest.