Wild bee populations are declining globally, with significant implications for ecosystem welfare and agricultural sustainability.
Wild bee welfare encompasses both individual animal experience and population-level considerations. Individual bees exposed to sublethal pesticide doses experience neurological impairment — difficulty navigating, impaired learning, and reduced foraging efficiency — that may constitute a form of welfare harm. Population declines represent the elimination of entire lives at enormous scale. Protecting wild bees benefits ecosystem health that supports countless other species, provides food security for human populations dependent on pollination, and directly reduces suffering in individual animals affected by pesticide exposure. Rewilding small areas — even window boxes and garden patches — with native flowers contributes meaningfully to wild bee population support.