Commercial queen bee rearing involves artificial manipulation of queen development and insemination that raises welfare questions about practices performed on billions of bees.
The welfare of individual queen bees during artificial insemination is unclear but involves physical manipulation and immobilization. The practice of allowing virgin queens to fight to the death during natural queen selection is a natural behavior but involves violence and death. Annual queen replacement kills productive queens that may have years of productive life remaining. The scale of commercial queen rearing — millions of queens annually — means that welfare practices in rearing have implications for large numbers of individual animals if bees are sentient.