Managed honey bee colonies face existential welfare threats from Varroa mite infestations, pesticide exposure, and habitat loss — with individual bee suffering an underappreciated component of the colony collapse phenomenon.
Individual honey bee welfare is a genuinely novel welfare question. Bees display sophisticated cognitive abilities including learning, memory, and some evidence of emotional valence. Varroa infestation causes physical damage — bees lose hemolymph, develop deformed wings, and may experience impaired sensory processing. Pesticide exposure at sublethal levels impairs navigation and learning in ways that may cause individual distress and certainly affects survival. The scale of managed bee populations — trillions of individual bees globally — means that even small per-capita welfare harms aggregate to very large total welfare costs. The collapse of colonies means the death of tens of thousands of individual bees whose welfare in the final days of a collapsing colony is unlikely to be good.