Native bees depend on nesting habitat and diverse floral resources that human land management can provide or destroy, with billions of individual bees affected by land use decisions.
Wild bee welfare at the individual level involves finding adequate food and nesting resources throughout the brief active season. Bees that cannot find sufficient pollen and nectar face nutritional stress affecting their reproductive success and individual survival. Bees exposed to pesticides may die acutely or experience sublethal effects on navigation and reproduction that prevent successful colony completion. The welfare impact of land management decisions scales multiplicatively with the number of bees using affected habitat. A single organic garden managed for native bees provides welfare benefits to thousands of individual bees over a season. A pesticide-treated agricultural field removes this benefit across an area supporting millions. The leverage that individual land management choices have over wild bee welfare makes this one of the most personally actionable areas of animal welfare.