Beeswax, Honey and Propolis: The Insect Exception

Carmine is an insect product and is widely treated as impermissible. Beeswax is an insect product and is not. The reason for the difference is the most useful idea in this whole subject.

Bee products are on a great many labels: beeswax glazing sweets and coating cheese, honey in everything, propolis and royal jelly in supplements, and beeswax throughout cosmetics.

People who have learned that carmine is an insect-derived colouring to avoid often assume the same applies here. It does not, and understanding why is more valuable than the answer itself, because the same principle resolves lanolin, milk, eggs and several other questions.

The principle

The difficulty with most animal-derived ingredients is not that an animal was involved. It is that an animal was killed, and that its slaughter was not carried out according to Islamic requirements. Gelatin, tallow, rennet and carmine are all products of a dead animal.

Products taken from a living animal without killing it are a different category. Milk, eggs, wool, lanolin, honey, beeswax and propolis all sit there, and none of them carries a slaughter question, because there is no slaughter.

Honey

Honey is not merely permitted but praised, with a chapter of the Qur'an named for the bee and honey described as containing healing for people. There is no scholarly question about honey itself.

What can complicate a honey-containing product is everything else in it — flavourings, gelatin in honey-flavoured sweets, alcohol in mead-style products. The honey is never the issue.

Beeswax

Beeswax is secreted from glands on a worker bee's abdomen and used to build comb. Beekeepers harvest it when extracting honey. It is E901 on European labels, and it appears as:

• A glazing agent on sweets, chocolate and coated tablets — which puts it right next to shellac on a label, and the two are often listed together as 'glazing agent'.
• A rind coating on some cheeses.
• A base in lip balm, lipstick, creams and ointments.
• A candle material, and in furniture polish.
• A capsule and tablet coating in pharmaceuticals.

Beeswax is regarded as permissible by the major certifying bodies and is routinely present in halal-certified products.

The shellac contrast, which is the one to get right

Shellac — E904, also called confectioner's glaze — is a resin secreted by the lac insect onto tree branches. Structurally the situation resembles beeswax, but the harvesting differs: the resin is scraped from branches along with large numbers of lac insects, which are killed in the process, and insect fragments are present in the raw material.

This makes shellac more contested than beeswax. Some scholars permit it on the basis that the resin is a secretion and the insect residue is incidental and removed by refining; others treat it as not permissible. Many halal certifiers flag it, and several avoid it.

The practical difficulty is that a label often says only 'glazing agent', which could be either. On a shiny sweet or a coated tablet, that phrase is worth resolving rather than assuming.

Propolis and royal jelly

• Propolis — a resinous material bees make from plant resins to seal the hive. Collected without harming bees. Permissible. Sold for throat and immune support, with modest evidence.
• Royal jelly — a secretion fed to larvae and to the queen. Harvested from queen cells. Permissible on the same basis. Note that it is a recognised allergen and can cause serious reactions in people with asthma or existing allergies.
• Bee pollen — plant pollen collected by bees. Plant material, permissible.
• Honeycomb — honey and beeswax together. Permissible.

The infant footnote

Not a religious point but the most consequential thing on this page: honey should not be given to infants under twelve months, because of the risk of infant botulism. This holds for raw and pasteurised honey alike, and for honey in cooked foods given to babies.

How we treat it

Beeswax, honey, propolis, royal jelly and bee pollen all pass our screen. Carmine and shellac trigger a hold.

An unqualified 'glazing agent' on confectionery moves a product into review, because the phrase covers both the permissible and the contested answer and the label has declined to say which.