Are There Dead Bees in Raw Honey?

Raw honey isn’t like the highly processed honey you find in local supermarkets. Raw honey is the pure stuff that is taken straight from the honeycomb and then filtered and put into jars for consumption. The main difference between raw honey and regular store brought honey is that raw honey is healthy and good for you. Regular honey is basically sugar.

The question that I often hear is if there are dead bees in raw honey. People want to know if they are going to get little bits of bee poop or even dead bees in the jar. No, you won’t and I’ll explain why.

 

Is Honey Vegan?

First things first. The bigger question people like to know is if honey is Vegan. It’s not. If you are a vegan and are following a strict vegan diet, then you won’t consume honey. However, vegans who are vegans for health reasons will oftentimes eat honey. If you’re a vegan for ethical reasons, on the other hand, you won’t eat honey because it involves the use of animals.

Now, the bees aren’t killed to make honey. So, vegetarians are fine with eating honey for ethical purposes. Some vegans are a bit conflicted about it since, if done right and respectful by a small beekeeper, then it’s not a harmful practice to the bees.

However, you need to be very careful about where you get your honey from. Large scale producers of honey will mistreat the bees, feed them sugar water, and sometimes smoke and kill underperforming hives in order to restart and boost production. So, vegans are essentially correct in that you need to be very wary about honey if you are planning on eating it.

 

Why Is Honey Not Vegan?

Honey is not vegan because it involves animals. Vegans do not believe in eating anything that involves animals. It’s different than vegetarians because vegetarian simply don’t want to eat animals. They are fine with eating eggs and milk, but are not ok with eating meat, fish, or other dead animals.

Honey is interesting because the bees do not have to be killed in order to make honey. There are some unscrupulous honey producers who end up smoking out and killing hives, but that’s not the norm. It’s sometimes practiced when people don’t want to have to deal with “wintering hives” but it’s considered unethical and not good practice. You can read more about it on some of the beekeeping forums.

So, make sure you only buy honey from a beekeeping producer who advocates against good beekping practice and does not kill hives to save money over the winter.

 

Are There Dead Bees In Honey?

No, on to the main question of the article. Are there dead bees in honey? No, there are not unless something unusual happens.

First, you have to understand how commercial honey producers and small time beekeeprs make and harvest honey. They use something called a queen excluder to separate the Queen from the honey chambers. This prevents the queen from laying brood eggs, which could turn into living bees.

A beehive that is maintained by a beekeeper and it’s different from a beehive that is found in nature.

The basics of a beehive include a “super” and a “brood box”. The queen is kept out of the “super” by a queen excluder. That way, she can’t lay drone eggs in the super and the only thing that is up there is honey.

The bees can get through the queen excluder because they are smaller than the queen. The excluder is a mesh screen. The bees go up there and fill up the super section of the hive with honeycomb. Down below, in the brood chamber, the queen will remain and lay eggs for drones.

The honey is collected from the above section, which will not have eggs.

The other thing to remember is that bees are super clean. When they do die, the other bees drag them out of the hive. Other bees do not want the dead bees to stay in the hive, so they are removed from the hive. The bees are extremely diligent about making sure the hive stays clean and functions optimally at all times.

When it comes time to process the raw honey, the beekeeper will take the honey from the supers. The bees that are currently working in the super will fly away when the frames are removed (the honey combs are built onto the frames.)

You’ve seen videos of beekeepers using smoke? That’s to chase away the bees. It doesn’t kill them, just makes them fly off.

Then the honey is removed from the frames with a tool and put into a large spinning machine that separates the honey liquid from the solids (this is done using centrifugal spinning). Unless you are buying raw honeycomb.

That liquid is then filtered through a screen to catch any solids (honeycomb chunks) and sold. It’s very , very rare for a dead bee to be in the honeycomb area, but if they were, they would be screened out. Potentially you would find one in a chunk of unfiltered raw honey, but even that is a super rare occurrence.

 

I don’t want to go to into depth, since this isn’t an article on how to become a backyard beekeeper, but basically, no, dead bees won’t be in your honey.

 Here’s some raw honey to check out (I always suggest you get raw honey).

 

Is There Bee Poop In Honey?

The next thing people want to know is if there is bee poop in honey. That’s a good question because, where exactly do bees poop? Well, it turns out that bees are super clean and will not poop in the hive unless they are sick and if they are sick, then there are other problems with the hive which will likely result in lowered or no honey production.

Bees will fly out of the hive in order to poop. Those bees who don’t leave and for some reason poop, will have that poop removed by other worker bees. Remember, the hive is where the bees live and they do not want it to be dirty. So not only are bees highly unlikely to poop in the hive, if a bee does happen to poop, it will be cleaned out by other bees