Managed honey bees face significant welfare challenges from disease, pesticide exposure, and intensive beekeeping practices, with their sentience status increasingly debated.
Honey bee welfare exists at two scales: individual bee welfare and colony welfare. Individual bees experience states interpretable as fear, pain, and positive experience. Colony-level welfare is affected by disease burden, foraging access, and management intensity. The mass die-offs of managed bee colonies represent both economic losses and the deaths of billions of individual insects whose welfare status is uncertain but non-trivially positive. Pesticide reduction and disease management benefit both individual and colony welfare.