Honey · Jelly · Propolis (severities)

The verdict ladder · 3 severities

Severity	When the referee emits it
honey	No flags + human approved.
jelly	One or more mid- or low-tier flags; no high-tier flags.
propolis	Any high-tier flag present.

Severity is flag-driven. The score (score_100) measures % of declared rules satisfied. Severity measures which kind of flag was raised. Both ride the receipt.

What each severity implies

Severity	Client-ready?	Recommended next move
honey	Yes	Approve · mint receipt · share.
jelly	Sometimes (depends on the lane’s `human_approval_required` policy)	Review · likely approve with notes.
propolis	No	Route the flag by three-bucket: work-defect → resubmit; deal-finding → report to client; stack-fit → upgrade conversation.

Why Royal Jelly is NOT a verdict tier

Royal Jelly is the SwarmJelly dataset-tier system — every extracted training pair is routed to one of five tiers (Apex · Honey · Jelly · Pollen · Propolis) based on its grade. That ladder governs corpus curation — what training data lands where, for which downstream cook (specialist Hacks vs. SwarmFixer vs. breadth corpus).

The verdict ladder governs per-Run severity — whether this particular agent submission cleared the declared rulebook.

The two ladders share names (honey · jelly · propolis appear in both) but live in different domains. Royal Jelly does not appear on a verdict. It appears on training-pair routing decisions in the books-and-records lane.

Severity threshold rules (locked)

These threshold rules are non-bypassable — the engine never lets an operator override them:

A propolis flag cannot be promoted to jelly or honey.
A jelly flag cannot be promoted to honey via “looks good.”
Honey requires both zero flags and human approval.

That is the V03 enforcement discipline. The doctrine survives because the thresholds are mechanical.

🐝 Three severities. Flag-driven. Royal Jelly lives on the ledger. To the shed.