Managed honeybees face welfare challenges from disease, pesticides, transport stress, and overextraction, while research into bee positive states opens new questions about what good bee welfare looks like.
Honeybee welfare exists at the boundary between individual and colony-level consideration. Bees are highly social insects whose welfare cannot be assessed solely at the individual level - a colony is in some sense the biological unit that matters. Yet individual bees show measurable stress responses, cognitive impairment under pesticide exposure, and optimistic or pessimistic cognitive biases that mirror welfare states in vertebrates. Managed colony welfare is shaped by disease burden (particularly Varroa), pesticide exposure, transport stress, and honey extraction practices. Welfare-conscious beekeeping minimises colony transport, uses integrated pest management for Varroa, avoids unnecessarily harsh colony management, and ensures bees retain sufficient honey stores through winter. The wider welfare threat - habitat loss reducing foraging diversity - requires landscape-scale action.