I get asked about two ingredients almost every week. Do you use royal jelly? What about bee venom?

They’re everywhere in beauty right now, promised as the next miracle for plumping, firming, turning back the clock. People are typically surprised when they see our bee based skin care and I tell them the same thing every time: we don’t use either one, and we never will.

I want to explain why, because the reasoning matters more than the answer.

When we founded BeeZerts, my daughter and I came at it the way we came at everything in both my career and her medical training. We don’t take the marketing claim at face value. We went to the science, and the peer reviewed sources. When looking at how these celebrated bee ingredients are farmed and harvested, we had to decide what kind of company we wanted and what mattered to us as a company.

Royal jelly: a question of what gets sacrificed

Royal jelly is the substance worker bees produce to feed a developing queen. It’s genuinely remarkable stuff, it’s the food that turns an ordinary larva into a queen. But how it gets harvested, even carefully, is worth understanding.

To make royal jelly in any real quantity, a colony is manipulated into believing it has lost its queen. The workers respond to that emergency by building queen cells and flooding them with jelly to raise a replacement. Beekeepers graft very young larvae, often only a day old, into artificial queen cups by hand, then collect the jelly a few days later, just before the larvae would outgrow the supply. The larvae are then removed and discarded. Even with careful harvesting, you cannot take the jelly and leave the larva alive.

Economics make it harder to justify, not easier. A single strong hive yields only a few hundred grams across an entire season, so commercial production means running this cycle repeatedly, holding colonies in a manufactured state of crisis that wears the hive down over time. There are operations that raise extra colonies for the sole purpose of feeding them into the process.

We got into this business in 2016 to find a way to reward responsible and sustainable harvesting of rich, beneficial bee based ingredients that took the excess the hive made, not more. We’re a brand built around healing, and I won’t anchor that to an ingredient made by keeping a colony in crisis and discarding the bee larvae that are essential to the sustainability of bee colonies. It isn’t what we stand for.

What we reach for instead

Walking away from royal jelly never meant walking away from what people want from it.

The reason it gets celebrated in skincare is renewal: skin that looks replenished, supported, and regenerated. Those are pathways we can care for beautifully without asking anything of a hive.

Our formulas use a vegan RNA and DNA yeast fermentation complex to support skin’s own renewal and repair signaling, which is the regenerative promise royal jelly is reached for in the first place. We pair it with tremella mushroom, a botanical that holds many times its weight in water for the cushioned, plumped hydration people associate with youthful skin, and a dual peptide system of vegan silk-derived peptides and marine algae peptides for firmness and resilience. Calming, barrier-supportive actives round it out, so skin stays strong and comfortable while the rest does its work.

It’s the same promise of renewal and resilience, delivered through actives we can stand behind, with nothing taken from the hive that the hive couldn’t spare.

Bee venom: a question of welfare and safety

Bee venom is the other one people ask about, and we leave it out for two reasons.

The first is welfare. Venom is collected by setting an electrified glass plate at the hive and shocking the bees into a defensive stinging response, on a schedule, repeatedly. The bees survive the sting itself, but the method works by deliberately agitating the colony and provoking it into a state of alarm, which disrupts foraging and the ordinary rhythm of the hive. We don’t want our ingredients to depend on keeping bees under manufactured stress for benefits that can be found in other substances.

The second reason is the one that matters most for who we make products for. Bee venom, apitoxin, is a known allergen, and for people sensitized to it, exposure can trigger serious allergic reactions. Bee and wasp venom are among the most common causes of anaphylaxis. A cosmetic dose isn’t the same as a sting, but BeeZerts exists for people with reactive, compromised skin, the very people least able to afford a bad reaction. Why would I put a known allergen into a product built to calm and heal?

A note on silk

Since we’re on the subject of insects, silk is worth a word, because we do use it, just never the way it usually comes. Traditional silk peptides are an ingredient common in prestige skin care, made from the cocoons of the silkworm, and conventional silk production kills the pupa inside the cocoon to keep the fiber intact. It’s the same line we draw with royal jelly: we won’t build an ingredient on manufacturing and farming a species just to be sacrificed for the benefit of skin care.

The silk in our formulas is vegan, made through a fermentation process from plant-based substances rather than from silkworms. It gives skin the same prized silk-protein benefits, the soft film, the lasting moisture, the smoothing, with a more consistent makeup and a gentler, but effective profile for reactive skin. Everything that is good about silk and nothing taken from the creature that makes it.

What bees and moths share

Step back from the individual ingredients and one thread runs through all of it. Bees and moths are both pollinators, the quiet workforce that keeps the living world in bloom. Bees carry pollen by day; moths take the night shift, and recent research has found they pollinate some flowers faster than bees do, reaching plants that daytime visitors miss.

Both are in trouble. Moth numbers have fallen by about a third in the last fifty years, and the wider loss of pollinators now threatens close to 90% of wild plants and the yield of around 85% of the world’s most important crops. When the pollinators go, so does much of what grows. We live in a world where all pollinators have struggled for existence with viruses, pesticides, and the lack of funding for the study of saving these creatures that are literally a key part of the heartbeat and sustainability of the world we live in.

That’s the real reason we draw these lines. A skincare brand is a small thing next to all of that, but the principle isn’t small. We won’t treat the creatures that sustain the living world as something to be used up and discarded. We take what can be given freely, from honey to vegan silk, and we leave the pollinators to do their work.

So why do we use honey, propolis, and pollen?

Because not everything from the hive is taken at a cost, and that distinction is the whole philosophy.

Honey, harvested responsibly, is a surplus. Bees make more than the colony needs, and a good beekeeper takes only that surplus and leaves the hive whole and well-fed. Propolis is the resin bees gather to seal and protect their home; collecting the excess doesn’t deprive them of anything essential. These are gifts of the hive, not sacrifices of it.

We use bee pollen the same way. Ours comes from small regional farms, and we process it ourselves, alcohol-free, so it stays gentle enough for reactive skin while keeping its actives intact. Like honey and propolis, pollen is gathered as a surplus without harming the colony, which is exactly why it has a place in our line.

And the honey itself has to earn its place. We use therapeutic grades with real, measurable bioactivity, the kind used in advanced wound care, not generic cosmetic-grade filler. If we put a honey in a formula, it’s because we can verify what it does and stand behind where it came from.

What’s next

We’re currently exploring honeys from Mongolian Steppes where the growing season is short and there is a complete lack of pesticides and contaminants making the rich antioxidant content of the wildflower honey packed with bioactivity. Mongolia is the birthplace of my cofounder and is the biochemist behind our formulas. It’s early, and any new honey will meet the same standard as everything else we use, which is sourced ethically, with bioactivity we can verify before it ever reaches your skin just as we do with our Manuka and Jarrah honeys.

What we owe them

So what do we actually do for the pollinators, beyond refusing to harm them? We can’t replant the world’s forage or rebuild every hive. What we can do is decide where our money goes and treat every ingredient we buy as a vote for the direction we want to see in the world.

We cast ours for the people doing it right: beekeepers who take only the surplus and leave their colonies whole, small regional farms instead of industrial supply, sourcing free of colony-destructive methods, and pollen we process ourselves, alcohol-free, so nothing is wasted or harshly handled. When a supplier meets that standard, our purchasing rewards it. When they don’t, we walk away. Every jar you buy sends that same demand back down the chain to the keepers and growers who earn it.

That’s the quiet power of commerce: it rewards whatever it is pointed at. We point ours at care, and we’d encourage you to point yours the same way, with us or with anyone who can show you exactly where their ingredients come from and what it cost the living world to make them. That is what we owe the pollinators, and we pay for it with every purchase.

Our Hive Ethics

•       No royal jelly. It can’t be harvested at scale without sacrificing developing bees.

•       No bee venom. It stresses the colony, and it’s a known allergen that doesn’t belong in skincare for sensitive, healing skin.

•       Surplus-only honey, taken in a way that leaves colonies whole and healthy.

•       Propolis, the hive’s own protective resin, gathered from the excess.

•       Bee pollen from small regional farms, processed in-house and alcohol-free to stay gentle and keep its actives intact.

•       Therapeutic-grade sourcing, with bioactivity we can actually verify.

•       Pollinators protected. Bees and moths keep the living world in bloom, and we won’t treat the creatures that sustain it as disposable.

www.beezerts.com

820 Main St · Grandview, MO 64030

Questions? Reach us at beezerts.com/contact