brent How do you know when you have an update? The box script thingy? Or the software center?
You can just remove the Notifications applet and that'll remove the bell, without affecting the functionality of Raven, same goes for the Raven Trigger. This was originally made as essentially a compromise between Ikey and I on having the ability to reliably open up one view v.s. the other aside from shortcuts (Win+A for Applets View, Win+N for Notifications View) during the time when we were changing from Win+N opening up the Applets view of Raven. The Notifications applet also provide a good indicator as to your current Do Not Disturb status and obviously if you have any missed notifications.
Both of the above mentioned panel applets can be removed via the Budgie Desktop Settings section for the respective panel. Your local configuration of Budgie (specifically panel configuration and other Budgie-specific functionality) will not or should not get affected by updates to Budgie (unless I explicitly change keys to intentionally enforce a behavior), because of how GLib Settings schemas work (essentially you have a "default" value, then that gets overridden by the user).