Wild bees are essential pollinators facing multiple threats. While invertebrate welfare is contested, the mass decline of wild bee populations represents an enormous scale of individual animal mortality worth considering.
Wild bees occupy a fascinating and contested position in welfare thinking. Their nervous systems are simpler than vertebrates but more complex than many invertebrates. Research has demonstrated that bees can show pessimistic cognitive biases when exposed to stressors - a finding analogous to negative affect states in mammals. The scale of bee mortality from pesticide exposure is enormous: billions of individual bees die from pesticide poisoning annually. Whether these deaths involve suffering in morally relevant ways is uncertain, but the precautionary principle, combined with the ecological services bees provide, creates a strong case for minimizing unnecessary bee mortality. Protecting wild bees is simultaneously an ecological, economic, and potentially welfare priority.