Managed and wild honeybee populations face multiple stressors that cause colony failure and raise emerging questions about individual bee welfare at enormous scale.
The welfare of individual bees is a genuinely difficult question with significant moral implications given the numbers involved. If bees have any capacity for suffering, the scale of that suffering in agricultural and wild bee populations is enormous. Varroa infestation causes measurable physiological stress and shortens bee lifespan. Pesticide exposure causing navigational failure means bees cannot return to their colony, dying alone outside when separated from their social group. The research into bee sentience including studies on pessimistic cognitive bias after negative experiences suggests these are not simple automatons but animals with some form of experience worth considering.