Honeybee welfare in commercial beekeeping encompasses practices including queen replacement, honey removal, and Varroa management that affect the welfare of billions of individual insects.
Honeybee welfare occupies contested scientific and ethical territory. While the individual bee has a very simple nervous system, honeybee colonies exhibit complex emergent behaviours and individual bees clearly respond to harmful stimuli in ways that suggest nociception. The scale of commercial beekeeping means that welfare considerations — even under considerable uncertainty about individual bee sentience — matter for enormous numbers of individual insects. Practices like queen killing, pesticide application within colonies, and honey removal with insufficient supplementation all represent potential welfare concerns that a serious welfare framework should address.