Wild pollinators including bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies, and butterflies are exposed to sublethal and lethal doses of agricultural pesticides that cause welfare harm at individual level and population decline at community level.
The welfare of individual pollinators exposed to pesticides encompasses acute toxicity causing death, and sublethal effects including impaired learning and memory, navigation failure, and reproductive impairment. Bumblebees navigating through agricultural landscapes may encounter multiple pesticide residues on successive flower visits, experiencing cumulative effects that impair their ability to return to the nest. Solitary bees provisioning nest cells with pesticide-contaminated pollen compromise larval survival. The aggregate welfare harm to billions of individual pollinators from agricultural chemical exposure is enormous and represents one of the largest-scale animal welfare problems in modern agriculture.