Wild Pollinator Welfare and Conservation

Bees, butterflies, hoverflies, and other pollinators face significant welfare and conservation challenges from pesticides, habitat loss, and disease.

Key Facts

Wild pollinator populations have declined dramatically in many regions over recent decades
Pesticides including neonicotinoids impair navigation, learning, and reproduction in bees
Habitat loss reduces the diversity and abundance of flowers available for pollinators
Managed honeybee diseases can spill over to wild bees and compound population declines

Welfare Considerations

Wild pollinators experience welfare harms from multiple sources simultaneously. Pesticide exposure impairs their ability to navigate, learn, and reproduce — effectively disrupting their behavioral capacities. Monoculture landscapes provide inadequate nutritional diversity, leading to malnourishment even where pesticide exposure is low. Disease transmission from managed hive bees to wild species adds additional pressure. Creating diverse, pesticide-free foraging habitats at landscape scale is the most impactful intervention for pollinator welfare, alongside regulatory restrictions on the most harmful pesticide classes.

What You Can Do

Plant diverse native flowering plants to provide season-long foraging for pollinators
Eliminate pesticide use in your garden, especially systemic insecticides
Support regulatory restrictions on neonicotinoids and other bee-harming pesticides
Participate in pollinator monitoring schemes to help track population changes