The bees and the honey were in a way a test for Samson. Will he be faithful to his Nazirite calling and avoid the honey? For contact with a corpse renders one unclean (Leviticus 11:24–25, Leviticus 11:39). And contact with a corpse is defiling particularly for a Nazirite (Numbers 6:6). To be sure, the prohibition in Numbers 6:6 is against contact with dead human bodies, but the term there translated body
(נפשׁ) can also refer to an animal carcass (Genesis 1:20, Genesis 1:24, Genesis 1:30; Genesis 2:7; Genesis 9:12, Genesis 9:15–16; etc.).1
How Samson does with this test is not kept from us for long. He scrapes some of the honey into his hands and eats it.
9 He scraped it out into his hands and went on, eating as he went. And he came to his father and mother and gave some to them, and they ate. But he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey from the carcass of the lion.