You can give a grown hen a lick of honey. A taste won’t poison her. But honey is about four-fifths sugar, and a single level teaspoon uses up about half of what she should get in treats all day. It has almost none of the protein or calcium her feed is built around. And honey isn’t a medicine chest for your flock. The honey dressings your vet might use are medical-grade. If you’ve got a hen with a foamy eye or a sour crop, that’s a call for your vet, not your pantry.
I rewrote this page from 14 sources, and they’re all listed at the bottom. The food numbers come from USDA’s FoodData Central. The feeding advice comes from three university extension services (Alabama, Colorado State, UC Davis), plus Cackle Hatchery and the Merck Veterinary Manual. Merck also covers honey on wounds, and two diseases: sour crop and Mycoplasma. Ontario’s farm ministry covers the bee disease, and a 2026 study covers honey in broiler chicks’ water. For the ant bait I read Poultry Science and eXtension, with the National Pesticide Information Center. Where something is my own math or my own call, I’ll tell you.
This page used to be full of stories. It opened with “Aunt Betsy’s prize-winning chickens” getting into her honey stores. It had a hen named Henny whose sour crop got better after “the vet suggested a bit of honey”, and a rooster named Rusty with “a bad scrape on his comb”. The writer said “I gave my chickens a whole jar of honey!” and had chicks that “loved nibbling honey-dipped chick treats!” I can’t vouch for any of it, so it’s all gone.
It also had home remedies, with doses. There were honey eye drops (“1 teaspoon honey in 1 cup boiled, cooled water”), honey in the water for a cough, honey stirred into mash for diarrhea and sour crop, and honey dabbed on peck wounds. There was a mite spray with “10 drops tea tree oil”, an ant bait of “1 part honey with 1 part borax”, a line of “petroleum jelly mixed with honey” at the coop’s entry points, and honey in the chick waterer. None of it came with a source. Chicken Rise doesn’t give doses, so it’s gone. The sections below tell you what the vet and extension sources say instead.
Some claims went too. The old page said “About 1 teaspoon per chicken, 2-3 times per week is plenty”, that honey would “support liver health”, and that it would “promote overall chicken health from comb to claws”. None of the sources I read backs any of that up. The three recipes are gone as well. There were grit treats and a peanut butter no-bake, plus honey molasses bars baked “at 300F for 20 minutes”. Each one just turns a sweet treat into a bigger sweet treat.
The short version.
- A lick, not a spoonful. A level teaspoon of honey is about half your hen’s treat allowance for the whole day. That’s my math, from USDA’s numbers.
- Honey is about 82 percent sugar by weight, with almost no protein and almost no calcium.
- Honey on wounds is real vet medicine, but it’s medical-grade honey, and only early in healing. If you see a wound or a foamy eye, call a vet who sees poultry. The same goes for coughs and sour crop.
- Don’t leave honey out in your run. It draws bees and ants, and honey from outside sources can carry spores of a bee disease.
- Your chicks get starter and water. No honey.
- The honey-and-borax ant bait and the tea tree mite spray are gone. If you need to treat for mites or ants, use a product labeled for the job.
A Teaspoon Is Half Her Treat Allowance
Start with how much a hen eats. Alabama Extension says “A laying hen will consume between 100 and 150 grams of feed per day or roughly 0.25 pounds.” Colorado State caps treats at 10 percent of her daily diet. UC Davis puts it more simply: “treat the scraps like a treat not like the main course”.
Ten percent of 100 to 150 grams is 10 to 15 grams a day. That’s her whole treat budget, for everything. Scraps and mealworms count against it. So does any honey you share.
Now the honey. USDA weighs a tablespoon of honey at 21 grams, so a level teaspoon is about 7 grams. USDA also lists 82.1 grams of sugar in every 100 grams of honey. So a teaspoon holds about 6 grams of sugar, and it uses up about half of her treat allowance in one go. A tablespoon is more than her whole allowance. That’s my math, from USDA’s numbers.
So my call is a lick, not a spoonful. Think a thin smear on a treat you were giving anyway, shared across your flock. And not every day. The old page’s “teaspoon per chicken” two or three times a week would spend half her treat budget on sugar on every one of those days.
Honey has no fat, at least. USDA lists 0 grams. That makes it a different problem from something like coconut, where the fat is the thing to watch, as our coconut page explains. With honey, the whole problem is sugar.
Feed Is the Meal, and Honey Is Nearly All Sugar
Here’s why the allowance matters. The feed you buy for your hens is built around what goes into an egg. Alabama’s table for laying hens calls for 16 percent protein or more and 3 to 4 percent calcium. Protein is “needed to make components of the egg (especially the albumen or egg white).” And the calcium goes into the shell. Alabama says “The eggshell is composed of around 96 percent calcium carbonate.”
Honey has almost none of either. USDA lists 0.3 grams of protein and 6 milligrams of calcium in 100 grams of honey. That’s about a fiftieth of the protein in her feed, and about a five-hundredth of the calcium at the low end. Most of the rest is 17.1 grams of water and 82.1 grams of sugar, nearly all of it fructose and glucose. My math again, from USDA’s numbers and Alabama’s.
The real risk with sweet extras is that they fill her up. Alabama warns that the birds “will fill up on these incomplete feeds and not consume enough of the complete feed to sustain egg production or growth.” Merck’s page on backyard poultry lists diluting complete feed with scratch or other extras among the common problems in backyard flocks. It says “birds should receive most of their diet from a balanced, nutritionally complete ration.”
Extra sugar is extra energy, too. Honey runs 304 calories per 100 grams in USDA’s table. UC Davis warns that “chickens can get obese”, and that fatty liver lobes can follow, “which can rupture and kill chickens.” So whatever your flock finds out in the run, most of what they eat should still come out of your feeder.
If You Share It Anyway
If you’d still like to share a taste, here’s how I’d do it.
- Plain honey only, not something sweetened with it. Our graham cracker page found honey comes after the sugar and the oil on the Honey Maid label.
- A thin smear on a treat you were giving anyway, shared out. Not a spoon for each bird.
- Out in the open, in an amount they’ll finish fast. Colorado State’s rule for any treat is “Do not feed more than can be consumed in 5 – 10 minutes to not attract nuisance animals.”
- Pick up and rinse whatever you served it on. Honey left out doesn’t stay a chicken treat for long, and the next section says why.
- Plain, clean water in your waterer. None of the feeding guides I read adds anything sweet to it, and Merck’s sour crop page names “unsanitary drinking facilities” as one way the infection starts.
- No honey for chicks. They get their own section below.
If you want to check another food, our can chickens eat it checker covers a long list of kitchen foods. For honey itself, this page is my answer.
Bees, Wasps and Ants Get There First
A dish of honey in the run won’t stay a chicken treat for long. Honey is sugar, and sugar left in the open pulls in bees and wasps. Ants find it too. Colorado State’s 5 to 10 minute rule is there to keep “nuisance animals” away, and a sticky lid sitting in your run all afternoon is the opposite of that rule.
If you keep bees, or a neighbor does, there’s one more reason to be tidy. Ontario’s farm ministry says American foulbrood “is caused by a spore-forming bacterium, Paenibacillus larvae, and is a serious brood disease of honey bees”. It also says “Honey and pollen obtained from outside sources may contain AFB spores. Honey from outside sources should not be fed to honey bee colonies.” And those spores are tough: “AFB spores are very resilient and able to survive heat and other environmental factors.”
Bees rob honey, too. Ontario says robbing can spread AFB “between different bee yards (up to 8 kilometres away) when AFB spores are transferred with the honey.” A jar from the store, smeared on a lid in your run where bees can reach it, looks a lot like the outside honey Ontario is talking about. That’s my reading, not Ontario’s words. But I’d rather not be the reason a neighbor’s hive gets sick. So wipe up spills, don’t leave the dish out, and rinse it.
Honey as Medicine Is a Vet’s Tool
Honey on wounds isn’t folklore. The Merck Veterinary Manual’s chapter on wound care says “honey is available both in pure medical-grade form and impregnated into multiple styles of bandages”. It credits most of honey’s germ-fighting power to a compound called methylglyoxal, and says manuka honey from New Zealand has the most of it.
But Merck also puts a limit on it: “The use of honey should be limited to the inflammatory phase.” That’s the early stage of healing, before new tissue starts to fill the wound. After that, Merck says honey can dry the wound out or damage the new tissue when the dressing comes off. And that chapter is about small animals. It doesn’t mention chickens at all.
So my call is that the jar in your kitchen isn’t a wound dressing. If your hen has a deep peck wound or a torn comb, take her to a vet who sees poultry. The same goes for a cut that won’t close. Your vet can tell you whether a honey dressing fits.
The eye drops and the cough remedy worried me more. Merck’s page on Mycoplasma gallisepticum lists coughing and sneezing in chickens, and breathing that’s rattly or hard. It says “Nasal discharge and conjunctivitis with frothiness of the eyes may be present”. It also says that once birds or flocks are infected, “they remain infected for life and act as carriers or reservoirs”. In laying hens, Merck says, it means fewer eggs per hen. If you see a foamy eye or hear a rattly breath, don’t dab honey on it and wait. Call your vet.
Sour crop is no different. Merck’s page on candidiasis in poultry gives sour crop as another name for it. Merck says it often follows a course of antimicrobial drugs or comes from dirty waterers, and that a quiet hen who’s off her food may be the only sign. It also says “No approved products are available for the treatment of candidiasis in the US.” And it lists look-alikes, wet pox and vitamin A deficiency among them. So if your hen’s crop feels squishy, she needs a vet’s eyes, not a spoon of honey.
We aren’t vets, and nothing here replaces one. If a bird is hurt or sick, call a vet who sees poultry.
The Mite Spray and the Borax Bait Are Gone
The old page’s mite spray mixed honey and water with “10 drops tea tree oil” and promised “The honey smothers mites while the tea tree oil kills them.” It gave no source for that. Our lice page covers what the vet and extension guides say instead: treat every bird with a product labeled for poultry, and follow the label, eggs included.
The ant bait was “1 part honey with 1 part borax” in shallow lids “around pest areas”, in the coop or the run. Borax is a pesticide. The National Pesticide Information Center says boric acid and its sodium borate salts are pesticides, and “Borax is one of the most common products.” It says boric acid “can kill insects if they eat it.”
To be fair, NPIC also calls boric acid “practically non-toxic to birds”. But that’s not the same as fine to eat. In a 2020 Poultry Science study, turkey poults fed a diet with 0.2 percent boric acid from hatch gained less weight over their first three weeks than poults on the plain diet. The same paper says boric acid on litter “is used in the prevention of darkling beetles within the poultry industry”. So it has a job in poultry houses, as a product used the way it’s meant to be. A homemade honey bait isn’t that.
And the bait is sweet on purpose, sitting in the coop or run where your hens walk. eXtension’s rule for ant bait where birds range is to “Choose a bait that is labeled for the site where the birds are ranging”, and to keep birds “confined outside the treated area during and for at least 24 hours after the bait application”. A lid of honey and borax has no label at all. So it’s out. If you’ve got an ant problem, our fire ant page goes through the bait rules in more detail. The “petroleum jelly mixed with honey” at the coop door is gone too, since it came with no source either.
Chicks Get Starter and Water
The old page mixed “a pinch of honey into Chick Starter Feed” for the first week, then put honey in the waterer, and dipped treats in honey for chicks to peck. All of that is gone.
Cackle Hatchery’s feeding guide says “Feed only starter ration for at least the first two weeks, when chicks need those important nutrients for fast growth”. After that, treats should be no more than 10 percent of the chicks’ diet by volume. And it says “Never feed chicks foods that are flavored with sugar, salt or other seasoning, butter, or oil”. Honey isn’t flavored with sugar. It’s mostly sugar, which I’d count as worse. So my call for your chicks is starter and clean water, and no honey. Our baby chick page has which fruits and vegetables can come later, and how small to cut them.
As for the research, the one trial of honey in chicks’ drinking water that I found was in meat birds. In a study published in January 2026, Farag and colleagues gave honey in water to 525 day-old male Hubbard broiler chicks, at two strengths and three schedules, and followed them to 35 days. The honey groups gained more weight and used their feed better. The authors wrote that “These findings support the potential of honey as a natural antibiotic-free additive”. But those were broilers raised for five weeks in a trial, not a backyard flock of layers. I’m leaving their amounts out on purpose, because this page doesn’t give doses.
So, can chickens eat honey? A healthy grown hen can have a lick now and then, out in the open. Keep it off your medicine shelf and out of the waterer. And keep it away from your chicks.
Sources
- USDA FoodData Central: Honey, SR Legacy food 169640.
- Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913).
- Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way.
- UC Davis and UC ANR: Feeding Your Flock (PDF).
- Merck Veterinary Manual: Management of Backyard Poultry.
- Merck Veterinary Manual: Topical Agents in Wound Management in Small Animals.
- Merck Veterinary Manual: Candidiasis in Poultry.
- Merck Veterinary Manual: Mycoplasma gallisepticum Infection in Poultry.
- Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness: American Foulbrood.
- Farag and colleagues, Archives Animal Breeding (2026): honey in broilers’ drinking water.
- Beer and colleagues, Poultry Science (2020): boric acid in turkey poults.
- eXtension Ant Pests: Fire Ants Where Free-Ranging Birds Occur (Internet Archive copy).
- National Pesticide Information Center: Boric Acid General Fact Sheet.
- Cackle Hatchery: What to Feed Baby Chicks.
Sources checked October 30, 2026. The treat math is mine, from the USDA and extension numbers above. So are the calls on how much to share and when to call a vet. We aren’t vets. If a bird looks sick or hurt, call a vet who sees poultry.
Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe