# Honeybee Sentience: Scientific Evidence and Implications for EU Animal Welfare Policy

## TL;DR

The paper argues that honeybees should be recognized as sentient beings in EU animal welfare laws due to their complex cognitive abilities and ecological importance.

## Contribution

The paper provides a novel interdisciplinary analysis linking scientific evidence of honeybee sentience to inconsistencies in EU animal welfare legislation.

## Key findings

- Honeybees exhibit cognitive and emotional traits comparable to legally protected vertebrates.
- Excluding honeybees from welfare legislation lacks scientific justification and poses ecological risks.
- A gradual, science-based policy update is proposed to align legal standards with current evidence.

## Abstract

This manuscript highlights a critical gap in European Union animal welfare legislation, which currently recognizes mammals, birds, and cephalopods as sentient beings, while excluding honeybees (Apis mellifera) despite growing scientific consensus on their complex cognitive, emotional, and sensory capacities, and even though the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness in 2024 acknowledged the realistic possibility of consciousness in invertebrates, including Apis mellifera, emphasizing the importance of considering their welfare based on scientific evidence. This analysis compares honeybees and cephalopods to expose inconsistencies in the legal acknowledgment of invertebrate sentience. The evidence demonstrates that honeybees possess behavioral and neurological traits akin to those of protected vertebrates, making their exclusion from legal safeguards both scientifically unfounded and ethically problematic. Given their vital role in pollination and ecosystem balance, the neglect of bee welfare has a direct impact in terms of One Welfare, posing broader ecological and agricultural risks. The authors propose a gradual, science-driven expansion of existing welfare policies, supported by a permanent observatory to ensure that legal standards remain aligned with evolving scientific knowledge. Such an approach would not only enhance the coherence of EU legislation but also support sustainable food systems and public health within the integrative One Health paradigm.

The growing recognition of animal sentience has led to notable progress in European Union animal welfare legislation. However, a significant inconsistency remains: while mammals, birds, and cephalopods are legally protected as sentient beings, honeybees (Apis mellifera)—despite robust scientific evidence of their cognitive, emotional, and sensory complexity—are excluded from such protections. This manuscript examines, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the divergence between emerging evidence on invertebrate sentience and current EU legal frameworks. Honeybees and cephalopods serve as comparative case studies to assess inconsistencies in the criteria for legal recognition of sentience. Findings increasingly confirm that honeybees exhibit advanced cognitive functions, emotional states, and behavioral flexibility comparable to those of legally protected vertebrates. Their omission from welfare legislation lacks scientific justification and raises ethical and ecological concerns, especially given their central role in pollination and ecosystem stability. In general, we advocate for the inclusion of Apis mellifera in EU animal welfare policy. However, we are aware that there are also critical views on their introduction, which we address in a dedicated paragraph of the manuscript. For this reason, we advocate a gradual and evidence-based approach, guided by a permanent observatory, which could ensure that legislation evolves in parallel with scientific understanding, promoting ethical consistency, sustainable agriculture, and integrated health under the One Health framework. This approach would meet the concerns of consumers who consider well-being and respect for the environment as essential principles of breeding, and who carefully choose products from animals raised with systems that respect welfare, with indisputable economic advantages for the beekeeper.