Managed pollinators — honey bees and bumblebees — are transported to farms for crop pollination services. Their welfare during commercial pollination deployments raises specific questions about stress, disease, and management.
Commercial pollination service welfare receives minimal public attention despite involving billions of individual insects annually. Long-distance transport of honey bee colonies disrupts normal colony cycles and exposes bees to pesticides and pathogens from multiple other colonies in proximity. The disease transmission from commercial bumblebee colonies to wild bumblebee populations is a welfare and conservation problem: commercial colony diseases spread to wild relatives who have no managed care. Pesticide exposure during pollination of treated crops represents welfare harm under sentience uncertainty at scale. The agricultural system dependence on commercial pollinators reflects the monoculture problem: wild pollinator diversity that would support crop pollination without commercial colonies has been eliminated from most intensive agricultural landscapes.