Pollinators including bees and butterflies are in dramatic decline globally. Their welfare in the context of pesticide exposure, habitat loss, and disease raises questions about invertebrate suffering at scale.
The welfare capacity of bees is now well-evidenced beyond basic nociception — research by Lars Chittka and others has demonstrated emotional states, pessimistic biases after negative experiences, and play behaviour in bumblebees. This makes pesticide-induced sublethal effects — navigation disruption, memory impairment, reduced foraging ability — welfare concerns, not just conservation concerns. Varroa mites feeding on developing bee brood and adult bees cause pain responses in animals with clear nociceptive capability. The scale of pollinator population decline represents a welfare emergency affecting billions of individual insects simultaneously, beyond its well-publicised ecological consequences.