While managed honey bee colonies receive significant agricultural attention, the welfare of individual forager bees — the billions of individuals exposed to field-level pesticide applications — is a less discussed but important welfare issue with significant colony-level consequences.
Individual honey bee welfare has received less attention than colony health, but the two are inseparable: colony collapse and decline ultimately manifest through the deaths and impairment of billions of individual forager bees whose navigational impairment, neurological damage, and death from pesticide exposure are individually experienced welfare events before they become colony statistics. Sublethal pesticide effects are particularly insidious from a welfare perspective: a bee whose navigation is impaired by neonicotinoid exposure does not die immediately but becomes lost, unable to find its way back to the colony, and dies alone from exhaustion and starvation — a prolonged individual welfare harm. The scale of this mortality across the agricultural landscape makes it one of the numerically largest invertebrate welfare issues in farming systems.