While bee conservation receives significant attention, other pollinators including hoverflies and butterflies face significant welfare challenges from habitat loss and pesticide use that receive less advocacy.
Pollinator welfare beyond bees represents an advocacy gap: the charisma and agricultural importance of bees has captured conservation attention while hoverflies, butterflies, and other pollinators decline with less support. The welfare status of these invertebrates remains uncertain but the precautionary principle and ecosystem services approach both support their protection. Individual butterflies experiencing habitat loss face starvation from loss of specific foodplants, pesticide sublethal effects impairing feeding and navigation, and thermal stress from climate change. The welfare significance of individual invertebrate suffering may be low given uncertain sentience, but the ecosystem welfare implications of declining pollinator communities are severe for all the plant and animal communities that depend on pollination services.