• Programs
• BEE Protective: Pollinators and Pesticides
• Pollinator Week 2026

Programs

• Agricultural Justice
• BEE Protective: Pollinators and Pesticides
  • BEE Protective
  • BEE Protective Ambassadors
  • Polli-NATION
  • Seeds That Poison
  • Pollinator Week 2026
  • What Can You Do?
  • Chemicals Implicated
  • Regulatory Action
  • Resources and Educational Materials
  • Press Releases and Media
  • What the Science Shows on Biodiversity
  • Pollinator Curriculum
• Bed Bugs
• Biodiversity
• Center for Community Pesticide and Alternatives Information
• Children and Schools
• Fund for Independent Science
• Hawai‘i
• Invasive Weed Management
• National Pesticide Forum
• Organic Agriculture
• Rodenticides
• Wildlife
• Wood Preservatives

National Pollinator Week Kicks Off with a Week of Actions!
JUNE 22-26, 2026 #PollinatorWeek

Life on a Leaf... From Bloom to Buzz!
An Organic Solution for Plants and Pollinators

Monday — Tuesday — Wednesday — Thursday — Friday

Pollinators—bees, butterflies, birds, bats, and other organisms—make a critical contribution to plant health, crop productivity, and the preservation of natural resources, but their existence is threatened by pesticide-contaminated habitats! Throughout the week, we will suggest actions that you can take to promote the health of pollinators.  

The first step is providing a safe place for pollinators to live, eat, reproduce, and take refuge from predators and adverse weather, which can include establishing pollinator-friendly plants as both habitats and food sources. 

In recognition of the importance of pollinators and biodiversity to a healthy environment and healthy people during National Pollinator Week, Beyond Pesticides announces a week of activities and actions!

Pollinator Week 2026 by Beyond Pesticides

Monday—Juneteenth and Environmental Justice

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously stated, "All life is interrelated." Justice for all people converges with the protection of biodiversity, health, and climate. If we are not protecting the most vulnerable in society, we ultimately adversely affect the entire society because all people are intricately linked through the web of life. By tapping into the power of working together, we can continue to move forward, as Dr. King says to do, in creating a sustainable future for all through implementing environmental justice with the widespread adoption of organic agriculture and land management. 

In a 2022 interview with Southern Environmental Law Center, Robert Bullard, PhD—known as the father of environmental justice—defines the term as the embracement of “the principle that all communities, all people, are entitled to equal protection of our environmental laws, housing laws, transportation laws…civil rights laws, human rights laws, and health laws and regulations.”  

As Pollinator Week follows closely after the celebration of Juneteenth on June 19, now is the time to renew our commitment to environmental justice while seeking the adoption of transformational policies and practices that recognize the urgency to address disproportionate harm inflicted by toxic pesticide use that affect all life. Those fighting for environmental justice understand that the harms inflicted by toxic chemical production, use, and disposal cause disproportionate adverse effects on people of color—from fenceline communities near chemical production plants to the hazardous and inhumane working conditions in agricultural fields, and the siting of toxic waste dumps, resulting in elevated risk factors for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) from toxic pesticide exposure.    

Amid the overwhelming evidence of disproportionate harm from pesticides to people of color in marginalized communities from pesticide exposure that result in deleterious health effects, captured in studies and research spanning decades [and tracked by Beyond Pesticides!], there is a solution that eliminates pesticide dependency and helps to address environmental injustice—organic agriculture, land, and building management. See the 2026 Juneteenth Daily News from Thursday, June 18, 2026, for more information.

What can we do? You can speak up for environmental justice and urge your U.S. Representative and Senators to ensure funding for meaningful programs that aim to protect essential workers who grow our nation’s food, as well as the health of their loved ones. As an example, see our previous Action of the Week: >> Tell Congress to restore funding that protects the health of farmers, farmworkers, and their families.

Tuesday—Cultivating An Organic Safe Haven for Pollinators

As Doug Tallamy, PhD, entomologist, conservationist, and professor at the University of Delaware, says: "Welcome bugs into your yard. You might just save the world." With pollinators responsible for over 80% of the world’s flowering plants, it’s no wonder we are fighting to protect them. Pollinators are important members of various land ecosystems; therefore, how we manage these ecosystems and landscapes plays a critical role in long-term pollinator health. The expansion of urban, suburban, and agricultural areas reduces pollinator habitat and access to food, while intensive chemical use harms these beneficial organisms. Pesticide applications expose bees, birds, butterflies, and more to acute and sublethal levels of pesticides, which can result in reproductive abnormalities, impaired foraging, and even death.  Please see our brief introduction to pollinators here!  

If you want to grow your own vegetables/fruits to eat or flowers for pollinators, make sure that your seeds and plants are free from harmful pesticides. Often, seeds and plants in many garden centers across the country are grown from seeds coated with toxic fungicides and bee-harming neonicotinoid pesticides or drenched with them. Ensure a pesticide-free garden by planting organic seeds and plants!  

Synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides lead to undesirable conditions that restrict water and air movement in the soil. High nitrogen fertilizers can disrupt the nutrient balance, accelerate turf growth, increase the need for mowing, and contribute to thatch buildup. See Spring Into Action for why going organic is beneficial for not only pollinators but all other organisms (including humans!) as well. 

View the recordings from the 42nd National Forum Series - The Pesticide Threat to Environmental Health: Advancing Holistic Solutions Aligned with Nature, where the speakers talk about their research and practical experience in identifying practices that embrace nature with a collaborative spirit and teach us about the value of bats, birds, and beavers in productive agricultural and land management systems, exemplifying the path forward in all aspects of modern life. 

Want to plant your own organic garden? Well, Beyond Pesticides offers a guide on how to Grow Your Own Organic Food, including a resource page on steps to take before planting. Find companies and nurseries that grow and distribute organic seeds and plants here: Seed and Plant Directory Brochure. 

Have a problem with unwanted plants (e.g., weeds) taking over your yard and garden? Beyond Pesticides' guide on how to Read Your Weeds allows you to identify weeds in your lawn and suggests nontoxic or least-toxic solutions. Additionally, Beyond Pesticides’ webpage on Ecological Management of Invasive Species is a great resource for weed management. Many plants that are considered weeds have beneficial qualities. Try to develop a tolerance for some weeds in your garden. For instance, clover is considered a typical turf weed, but it thrives in soil with low nitrogen levels, compaction issues, and drought stress. See Taking a Stand on Clover: The benefits of clover to bees, soil biology, and water quality to learn more.

In addition, millions of miles of roads, utility lines, railroad corridors, and other types of rights-of-way (ROWs) are treated with pesticides to control unwanted plants and insects. Some states have addressed the risk of using pesticides along ROWs by developing integrated pest management (IPM) programs, restricting when and where pesticides can be applied on ROWs, and/or providing no-spray agreements. Planting native vegetation, using mechanical, biological, and least-toxic vegetation control methods are effective in reducing and eliminating toxic pesticide applications.  

What can we do?  Take action, and encourage your community to develop an integrated roadside vegetation management program for roadside management. Cut, girdle, mow, or use grazing animals whenever possible as a mechanical means to eradicate unwanted vegetation. Establish a roadside wildflower program that plants native flower and grass species, especially those that are attractive to bees and other pollinators. Avoid pesticides such as 2,4-D, glyphosate (Roundup), dicamba, picloram, and triclopyr for roadside management so as not to create ecological traps that harm pollinators. Look to our Pesticide Gateway page for more information!

What else can we do? Order a Pesticide-Free Zone sign to showcase your organic yard or garden, share resources with your community, and share photos of pollinators on social media with the hashtags #PollinatorWeek or #ProtectPollinators—then submit them to Beyond Pesticides’ Art Page! 

Beyond Pesticides advocates for widespread adoption of organic management practices as a social good and key to protecting pollinators and the environment. We have long sought and encouraged a broadscale marketplace transition to organic practices, local, state, and federal policies that prohibit the use of toxic synthetic pesticides, and a systems-based approach that is protective of health and the environment. (See BEE Protective for more information.) 

Since 2006, honey bees and other pollinators, in the U.S. and worldwide, have experienced ongoing and rapid population declines. This continuing crisis threatens the stability of ecosystems, economies, and the food supply: one-third of the food we eat requires pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

A 2026 study of honey bee colonies in Florida and California, published in Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology, finds elevated mortality from pesticide residues, including those that have been documented to threaten pollinators. As the authors describe, “While bees die from multiple, often interacting, stressors, here we show single contributors at levels capable of causing acute harm.” The presence of miticides, fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides within the bee colonies, including in the bodies of dying bees, further highlights pesticides as drivers of bee declines. 

By sampling both dying bees and in-house bees for chemical residues, the researchers are able to compare symptomatic colonies and control colonies. The authors note, “Our findings differ from previous screenings, which cast a broad net, screening agrochemicals in colonies nationwide, and not necessarily from impacted operations.” This study, however, shows the presence of specific pesticide residues in commercially managed colonies after die-off incidences. The neonicotinoid insecticide imidacloprid, in particular, is widely detected and found in high levels, with the researchers identifying the compound as the largest contributor to bee death. (See more here.) 

What can we do? Take Action! The Trump administration's U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is shutting down its research facilities at Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in Beltsville, Maryland. Among those facilities is the Bee Research Laboratory (aka Bee Lab), which conducts research that has been essential in raising issues critical to the health of honey bee colonies, responding to crises, and helping beekeepers maintain an adequate healthy supply of bees for the pollination of crops. The Bee Lab is not the only federal pollinator program to face funding cuts or dismantling. Also facing threats to funding are the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Ecosystems Mission Area, which includes the USGS Bee Lab, other USGS research centers, and U.S. Forest Service research stations.  

>> Tell Congress and USDA to preserve the Beltsville agricultural research facilities that support farming and beekeeping nationwide. 

What else can we do? You can play a role in protecting pollinators simply by growing an organic garden with colorful, bee-attractive flowering plants, pledging it as pollinator-friendly, or even organizing your community, schools, or local government to make choices that foster pollinators. Don’t have a garden? Windows and balconies are also great places to feature plants to encourage pollinators to stop by! Backyard trees, gardens, and beekeeping are great ways to support biodiversity and pollinators. Intentionally providing water, food, and forage to pollinators will encourage and boost pollinator populations in your community.   

Check out the BEE Protective Habitat Guide, the Do-It-Yourself Biodiversity resource, which offers hints about increasing biodiversity, and the Pollinator-Friendly Seed Directory. 

Additionally, check out the short film “The Seeds That Poison,” a Beyond Pesticides’ feature video highlighting the hazards associated with a major use of bee-toxic pesticides—seed coatings! 

Thursday—Parks for a Sustainable Future—Become an Advocate!

Does your community have a pesticide-free park managed with organic practices? Do you wish it did? The time to take action to protect those parks and create new ones is now!   

With Beyond Pesticides’ supporters, including the retailer Natural Grocers in the Midwest and west, the Beyond Pesticides’ Parks for a Sustainable Future program provides in-depth training to assist community land managers in transitioning two public green spaces to organic landscape management, while aiming to provide the knowledge and skills and experience necessary to transition all public areas in a locality to these safer and sustainable practices. 

Through this program, Beyond Pesticides has assisted local leaders in converting the following parks and recreational areas exclusively to organic practices. With this program, Beyond Pesticides is currently working with 19 park districts in 12 states. In addition, Beyond Pesticides has worked with dozens of communities to adopt land management policies in jurisdictions of nearly every state in the country. The goal is to create models that show the viability and cost effectiveness of organic management systems that eliminate petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers that contribute to the current health crisis, biodiversity collapse, and the climate emergency. 

FINAL—NYC Parks Flyer 1.22.26 (11 x 8.5 in) by Beyond Pesticides

Friday—Pollinator Protection Starts with Organic Practices

In light of EPA’s failure to protect pollinators from pesticides, the lives of those essential insects, birds, and mammals are increasingly dependent on state and local laws in the absence of federal programs that are currently being dismantled or severely cut. In particular, bird species are crucially important for preserving biodiversity, as well as providing ecosystem services such as pollination and mosquito management. Protection of birds and their habitats allows for other organisms, including humans, to prosper.  

Mosquito season is upon us! Not only is spraying flying mosquitoes the most ineffective way to prevent mosquito problems, but it is also counterproductive because it eliminates some of our most attractive and helpful allies—birds.

While the appetite of purple martins for mosquitoes is well known, most songbirds and hummingbirds eat insects at some stage of their life. Many birds who eat seeds or nectar feed insects to their young, including flying insects that may be bothersome–like mosquitoes or flies. Altogether, birds consume as many as 20 quadrillion individual insects, totaling 400-500 million metric tons, per year.   

Mosquito-eating birds incorporate many well-known residents of our communities. They include, for example, wood ducks, phoebes and other flycatchers, bluebirds, cardinals, downy woodpeckers, swallows, swifts, robins, orioles, wrens, great tits, warblers, nuthatches, hummingbirds, red-winged blackbirds, grackles, chickadees, sparrows, nighthawks, and even the much-maligned starlings. 

Insectivorous birds are an essential part of global food webs that bring balance to ecological communities, but birds are not the only insectivores to feed on mosquitoes. Animals who contribute to maintaining ecological balance by consuming mosquito larvae and adults include insects, spiders, fish, amphibians, and bats. All are threatened by pesticides. 

What can we do? Attract birds to your yard to keep mosquitoes from feasting on you and take local action! >> Tell your Governor and Mayor to ensure ecological management of mosquitoes by eliminating the use of pesticides that threaten mosquito predators.

Since interactions and synergism are the rule, pesticides cannot be evaluated on the basis of single-chemical, single-species tests. They must be evaluated in context—that is, the system of chemical-dependent management of crops, landscapes, and structures must itself be questioned. Fortunately, there is an alternative system—regenerative organic production and land management—that is both successful and a suitable standard of comparison. The only way to truly protect pollinators, insects, birds, and other species, as well as the biosphere as a whole, is to stop the use of toxic pesticides completely. Converting the world's agricultural systems to organic would have a tremendous positive impact on threatened populations. >>Tell EPA, FDA, and Congress that regulations must consider the effects of pesticides in the context in which they are used and with reference to the organic alternative.

What else can we do? Use safer personal mosquito repellents. (See How To Repel Mosquitoes Safely for more information.) Spread the word to your neighbors on safer mosquito management with Beyond Pesticides' doorknob hanger, Manage Mosquitoes This Season without Toxic Chemicals.

Retrospective: The Foundations of Pollinator Science

As the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, PhD, famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." We must learn from the wide body of research that has existed for decades on the impacts of pesticides on nontarget organisms, including pollinators, that is captured on the What the Science Shows on Biodiversity resource page. 

There is widespread consensus in the scientific community that pesticides are having a devastating effect on the sustainability of pollinator populations. A systematic review of insect declines worldwide finds pollinators, and insects as a whole, in dire trouble. Research findings across several studies confirm that agricultural intensification, pesticide use, and in particular, the spread of systemic insecticides, are the main drivers for ongoing mass pollinator declines. 

Multiple studies have confirmed that the levels of neonicotinoid pesticides that bees encounter in the environment are toxic enough to impair foraging, navigational, and learning behaviors, as well as suppress immune responses. These individual impacts are compounded at the level of social colonies, weakening collective resistance to common parasites, pathogens, and other pesticides, thus leading to colony losses and mass population declines. In 2018, more than two hundred scientists co-authored a “Call to restrict neonicotinoids” on the basis of the bulk of evidence implicating neonicotinoids in mass pollinator and beneficial insect declines.

In the early 2000s, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) brought national attention to increased honey bee colony losses. During the same period that CCD and colony losses spiked, neonicotinoid prevalence skyrocketed, in large part due to the introduction of seed-delivered technologies. Native pollinators are similarly threatened by increased use of systemic insecticides. Studies of wild and managed pollinators in the field have shown significant colony and population declines as a direct result of neonicotinoid crop treatment and intensified pesticide use. Recent research showcases the negative effect of chemical-intensive, conventional farm management on insect populations when compared to organically managed meadows, highlights the benefits of organic for insect biodiversity. (See additional coverage on pollinators here.) 

David Hackenberg, the commercial beekeeper who first discovered colony collapse disorder and speaker at the 30th National Pesticide Forum, was the first to discover CCD. As was shared in a joint press release by Beyond Pesticides and Pesticide Action Network in 2010:  

“We are losing more than a third of our colonies each winter; but beekeepers are a stubborn, industrious bunch. We split hives, rebound as much as we can each summer, and then just take it on the chin – eat our losses. So even these big loss numbers understate the problem,” says 50-year beekeeper, David Hackenberg. “What folks need to understand is that the beekeeping industry, which is responsible for a third of the food we all eat, is at a critical threshold for economic reasons and reasons to do with bee population dynamics. Our bees are living for 30 days instead of 42, nursing bees are having to forage because there aren't enough foragers and at a certain point a colony just doesn't have the critical mass to keep going. The bees are at that point, and we are at that point. We are losing our livelihoods at a time when there just isn't other work.” 

Click above to view David Hackenberg's talk during the 2012 National Forum series Healthy Communities: Green solutions for safe environments. 

“We need worms to create soil; flies and beetles and fungi to break down dung; ladybirds and hoverflies to eat greenflies; bees and butterflies to pollinate plants to provide food, oxygen, fuel, and medicines, and hold the soil together; and bacteria to help plants fix nitrogen and to help cows to digest grass. . . [yet] we often choose to squander the irreplaceable, to discard those things that both keep us alive and make life worth living. Perhaps if we learn to save a bee today, we can save the world tomorrow?”

—David Goulson, PhD, A Sting in the Tale (2013)

Click above to view Dr. Goulson's talk during the 2023 National Forum series Forging a Future with Nature—The Existential Challenge to End Petrochemical Pesticide and Fertilizer Use. The National Forum Series aims to enable a collective strategy to address the existential health, biodiversity, and climate threats and chart a path for a livable and sustainable future. We come together to empower effective action. You are part of the solution!

Coverage on Current and Emerging Science 

• Adding to Wide Body of Science, Study Finds Pesticide Residues in Honey Bee Colonies Cause Acute Mortality
• Widespread Multiple Pesticide Exposure with Adverse Effects Again Documented in Honey Bee Hives
• Elevated Oxidative Stress Damages Life-Essential Cell Function in Bees on Conventional, but Not Organic, Farms
• Insecticides Gravely Threaten Honey Bee Gut Microbiome, Study Findings Expand on Previous Research
• Pollinating Wild Bees Needed for Agricultural Productivity as Exemplified in Tomato Cultivation, Study Shows
• Study Highlights Benefits of Organic Agriculture for Pollinator Health, Building on Existing Research
• Neonicotinoid Insecticides Cause Deadly Overheating Behavior in Honey Bees, Study Finds
• Pervasive Pesticide Contamination of Beehives Across Europe, the First EU-Wide Study of Its Kind 

Additional Resources

• Keeping Organic Strong 2026
• Resource on Professional Pest Management Providers