Social insects like bees and ants show complex behaviors and responses that raise questions about their capacity for welfare, with important implications for agriculture and pest control.
The welfare of social insects sits at the frontier of animal sentience research. While certainty about insect subjective experience remains elusive, the complexity of bee cognition - including tool use, counting, and pessimistic cognitive bias after stress - suggests these are not simple stimulus-response machines. Given the enormous numbers of insects affected by human activities, even a small probability of sentience has significant welfare implications for agriculture, pesticide use, and urban development.