Royal Jelly in Honey, Inc.
Royal Jelly is the name of two separate things in the game: the eighth honey type, and the prestige currency you earn by reincarnating. This page separates them.
Two things share one name
If you have searched for Honey, Inc. Royal Jelly and come away confused, you are not doing anything wrong. The game genuinely uses the name twice, for two systems that have almost nothing to do with each other. One is a product your farm makes. The other is the prestige currency that carries your account forward between resets, and the source of the Royal Jelly bonus that raises everything you earn.
| Name as it appears | What it is | How you get it |
|---|---|---|
| Royal Jelly (honey type) | The 8th of the 10 honey types, a product tier with a base value of 1,000,000 | Unlocks when your farm value reaches 6,750,000,000,000,000 |
| Royal Jellies (RJ) | The prestige currency. Each one grants a permanent +1.2% earnings bonus | Awarded when you reincarnate |
A quick way to keep them apart: the honey type is singular and sits in your production chain, while the currency is almost always written in the plural — Royal Jellies, or RJ — and sits on your account, not on your farm.
Royal Jelly, the honey type
Honey, Inc. has ten honey types, and each one is a complete restart of your production economy at a higher base value. Royal Jelly is the eighth of them. A unit of Royal Jelly is worth 1,000,000 at base, against 2 for Basic Honey at the start of the game — the whole ladder is built on jumps of that size.
| # | Honey type | Base value | Farm value required |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 | Tupelo Honey | 250,000 | 135,000,000,000,000 |
| 8 | Royal Jelly | 1,000,000 | 6,750,000,000,000,000 |
| 9 | Quantum Honey | 4,500,000 | 338,000,000,000,000,000 |
| 10 | Temporal Honey | 18,000,000 | 16,900,000,000,000,000,000 |
The unlock condition is farm value, not a player level — there is no XP in Honey, Inc. Your farm value is the single number the game uses to decide what you have access to, and it is what the Scale of Production tiers are measured against.
Switching honey types is a reset, not an upgrade. When you move to a new honey type you start a fresh farm at that type's base value. Your production, not just your price per unit, goes back to the beginning. Each new farm opens in the morning. Plan the switch as a deliberate mid-game reset rather than a button you press the moment it lights up.
Royal Jellies, the prestige currency
Idle games usually offer a trade: give up your progress, get something permanent in return. In Honey, Inc. that trade is reincarnation, and the permanent thing you get back is Royal Jellies. The farm resets. Your Royal Jellies do not, and neither do your Honeycombs or your epic research.
Two conditions gate your first reincarnation:
- You must have reached at least honey tier 4, Acacia Honey.
- The current run must have earned at least 25,000,000.
Until both are true, the option is not available. That is worth knowing early, because a lot of new players go looking for prestige in the first hour and conclude the game does not have it. It does — it is just placed several honey types up the ladder, far enough in that you have had time to build a real farm with proper buildings and a stack of ordinary research behind it.
The Royal Jelly bonus, and its cap
Each Royal Jelly grants a permanent +1.2% earnings bonus. The bonus is cumulative and it applies to every run you play from that point on, including the one you are in the middle of. It is capped at +25% in total.
That cap is the number people miss. Royal Jellies do not scale forever. Working from the two published figures — 1.2% each, 25% maximum — the bonus tops out somewhere around the twenty-first Royal Jelly, and every RJ after that adds nothing to your earnings rate. It is a modest, bounded multiplier by design, not the runaway prestige curve that some idle games use.
So why keep collecting them past the cap? Because Royal Jellies are also a score. The leaderboard ranks players on Royal Jellies, along with cycles, Honeycombs and farm level. Once the earnings bonus is maxed, RJ become the record of how many times you have gone around, which is exactly what a prestige count is for.
Where Royal Jellies fit against the rest of your progress
It helps to think of Honey, Inc. as three separate ledgers that reset at different rates.
| Ledger | Contents | Survives reincarnation? |
|---|---|---|
| The farm | Cash, hives, buildings, vehicles, regular research | No — this is what you trade in |
| The account | Royal Jellies, Honeycombs, epic research | Yes |
| The bonus | +1.2% per RJ, to a +25% ceiling | Yes, permanently |
Because the middle row persists, the strongest thing a long-term player owns is not a big farm — farms come and go — but a deep stack of epic research bought with Honeycombs. There are 18 epic upgrades, and two of them are named for this system directly: Royal Jelly Amplification and Reincarnation Mastery. If you intend to run the prestige loop repeatedly, those are the ones to read carefully in-game before spending.
Playing toward your first reincarnation
The practical route to Royal Jellies is the same as the route to everything else: raise farm value. Bees produce, storage processes, the depot ships, and every one of those steps has upgrade levels behind it. Push through the honey types until you are on Acacia or beyond, clear the 25,000,000 earnings requirement for the run, and the option opens.
A few things that matter more than they look:
- Bee count and refill rate. The bee capacity upgrades run 50 → 100 → 200 → 350 → 500, and refill rate runs 1 → 5.4 bees per second. Both are cheap relative to what they unlock later in a run.
- The Research Lab. Six levels, and the research multiplier climbs from 1× to 10×. It compounds with everything else you buy.
- Away time. Idle progress is real progress — bees work at 80% efficiency while you are gone and you keep 100% of the honey produced. See offline progress for how the stored window is extended.
- Wasps. Tapping wasps is the free, repeatable source of Honeycombs, and Honeycombs are what buy the epic research that survives your resets.
If you are early enough that none of this is in reach yet, start with beginner tips and the how to play overview, then come back once Acacia Honey is on the board.