Colony collapse disorder and widespread honeybee population decline raise complex welfare questions about the billions of individual bees affected. Understanding bee welfare science informs beekeeping practices.
Honeybee welfare sits at the frontier of welfare science because of unresolved sentience questions combined with enormous scale. If honeybees experience welfare-relevant states - as some evidence suggests - the welfare implications of colony collapse are enormous. At the colony level, starvation, disease, and pesticide exposure cause colony death which is clearly bad for the bees. Beekeeping practices including honey removal, queen replacement, and transport for pollination all affect individual and colony welfare. The precautionary principle suggests treating bees as potentially sentient in management decisions.