POLLINATOR WEEK, June 16-22, 2025
Pollinator Week is an annual celebration organized by Pollinator Partnership. It’s a time to appreciate our many pollinators friends (bees, butterflies, birds, bats, beetles, and other small creatures), raise awareness of how much they do for us, and spread the word about how to protect them.
There are lots of ways to celebrate Pollinator Week:
- Download the Pollinator Week Toolkit!
- Plant a pollinator-supporting flower or native plant!
- Share pollinator facts with friends! (For example, “about 75% of all flowering plant species need animal pollinators for reproduction” and “pollinators like bees, butterflies, and bats provide 1 out of 3 bites of food we eat.”)
- Forest Bathe and hear the buzzing of pollinators around you!
- Tour a garden and notice which plants attract the most pollinators!
- Learn about special weird-o pollinators! (For example, the tiny wasp that pollinates figs, an orchid-pollinating mosquito, or the wild hoary squash bee, Xenoglossa pruinosal, featured in this year’s Pollinator Week logo.)
- Use hashtag #PollinatorWeek when posting on social media about all your pollinator fun!
One extra-fun thing you can do is participate in Pollinator Week’s international Bioblitz on iNaturalist, hosted by the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign’s (NAPPC) Pollinator Communications Taskforce. Bioblitz data will help scientists protect and conserve our incredibly valuable community pollinators — so exciting!
What’s a Bioblitz? It’s just a flashy name for a biological survey that documents as many species as possible at a specific time and place. Pollinator Week Bioblitz participants will be collecting data on the distribution of pollinators across the US, Canada, and Mexico and the floral resources that support them.
To help celebrate, Kirke Park’s Secret Garden is throwing a Pollinator Party — including our own little Bioblitz — on Saturday June 21, from 1pm to 4pm. We’ll observe and identify pollinators and post pictures of them visiting flowers in the garden to iNaturalist. Also on hand will be information on local bees, hand lenses for closer observation, and a Pollinator Scavenger Hunt for the younger citizen scientists buzzing around.
The Pollinator Project Bioblitz project is easy to join, and consists of taking pictures of pollinators and the flowers they are visiting and uploading them to iNaturalist to be included in the dataset. To learn more and sign up, visit iNaturalist. iNaturalist has lots of information about how to Get Started — including video tutorials and how to start a project of your own.
It’s a good idea to download the iNaturalist app (App Store / Android) and create an account before the Bioblitz begins, so you can start recording observations right away. You might also want to download iNaturalist’s Seek app, which you can use to identify the pollinators you see.
Even when it’s not Pollinator Week, you can use iNaturalist to upload observations in local wildlife areas, around your neighborhood, in your own yard — or right here at Kirke Park!
Citizen Scientists Unite!
Photo: @bdobb
For more information about Pollinator Week, visit the Pollinator Partnership’s website.
Resources
Our Resources page includes a looooong list of links to all sorts of information about bees, other pollinators, gardening for pollinators, Kirke Park partners, and much more.