Commercial pollination services transport billions of bees across continents in hive trucks, exposing colonies to stresses that impair bee health and welfare at massive scale.
The welfare of commercially managed honey bee colonies during transport represents a challenge at an extraordinary scale. Billions of individual sentient insects experience thermal stress, mechanical disturbance, and disruption of their highly coordinated social thermoregulation during transport. The question of whether individual bee welfare should weigh in transport decisions is contested, but colony-level welfare impacts on the surviving colony are clear: transported colonies show elevated disease susceptibility, higher mortality rates, and reduced foraging efficiency. The concentration of global almond and berry production in ways that require mass pollination transport creates systemic welfare risks that local, diversified pollination strategies would reduce.