![]() ![]() ![]() You can find our other work on invertebrate sentience and invertebrate welfare here. This report is the first in Rethink Priorities ’ series on farmed invertebrates. Much uncertainty remains, and more research would be required to determine the ultimate wisdom and cost-effectiveness of these interventions.Īppendix 1: How This Report Was CompletedĪppendix 2: Estimating the Number of Managed Honey BeesĪppendix 3: Pollination, Honey, and Other Bee Products However, it’s not clear that these interventions are promising enough to be pursued in the near-term. The effective animal advocacy movement can help a significant number of managed bees by promoting welfare-oriented management techniques, supporting academic research that has the potential to advance honey bee welfare, encouraging welfare-oriented policies and regulations, and reducing the demand for commercial pollination services. Managed bees suffer from a variety of problems, including pesticide exposure, poor nutrition due to inadequate access to natural forage, invasive hive inspections and honey harvest, stress from long-distance transport, and parasite and pathogen spread exacerbated by common management techniques. Beekeepers have a financial incentive to maintain the health of their colonies, but they have little reason to look after the welfare of individual bees. Commercial beekeeping techniques standardly treat managed bees as a resource from which to maximize the extraction of value. Asia, especially China and India, hosts the largest populations of managed bees and accounts for much of the recent growth in bee stocks. Increases in demand for honey and (especially) commercial pollination services continue to outpace the increase in supply of managed bees. Globally, the number of managed colonies has risen steadily over the last twenty years and this growth will almost certainly persist, at least in the short term. At any given time there are more than a trillion managed honey bees. ![]()
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