Wild bee populations are declining dramatically across the world, with habitat loss driving food insecurity and population collapse that represents a major welfare crisis for billions of individual bees.
Wild bee population declines represent a welfare crisis for billions of individual insects experiencing food insecurity, habitat loss, and pesticide stress. Whether or not individual bees have welfare-relevant subjective experiences at certainty equivalent to vertebrates, the precautionary principle and emerging evidence of bee emotional states justifies concern. More clearly, the decline of wild bees creates indirect welfare consequences for other animals — the fruit trees that fail to set without adequate pollination support birds and mammals whose food supply depends on those fruits. Habitat creation for wild bees is simultaneously a welfare and ecological investment.