Honey bees are farmed at vast scale for honey and pollination services. Their welfare raises questions about acceptable practices in a commercially essential and complex social animal.
Honey bee welfare sits at the intersection of commercial agriculture, ecosystem services, and emerging scientific understanding of invertebrate experience. Commercial beekeeping practices including colony migration for pollination services, queen culling and replacement, and chemical mite treatments all have welfare implications for insects that may have some capacity for negative experiences. The strongest welfare concern is Varroa mite infestation, which when uncontrolled causes colony collapse with associated suffering across thousands of individuals. The question of whether honey bees have morally significant experience remains scientifically contested, but the scale of bee farming and the importance of bee welfare to ecosystem function warrant serious attention.