Happy National Pollinator Week!

Seriously. It’s National Pollinator Week, June 16 – 22, 2014. It’s a national…well, not exactly a holiday–a national time to stop and think about it.

Of course they have National Everything Week–not a day goes by but it’s National Something Day or Week or Month. National Women’s History Month (we only have enough history to fill up one month). National Jazz Appreciation Month. There’s National Pig Day (March 1, put it on your calendar for next year). National Ice Cream Month, a worthy cause indeed, officially designated in 1984 by Ronald Reagan. Of course many of these commemorative dates are truly worthwhile, like National Diabetes Awareness Week, for example, or Banned Books Week, one of my favorites. But among all the worthy and not-so-worthy causes, National Pollinator Week, silly as it sounds, is the one with perhaps the most serious long-term implications for the human race.

So set aside some time to take your hat off to pollinators–not just the bees, who get all the good press, but the bats and the carrion beetles and all the nondescript little bugs that tirelessly carry pollen from one flower to another so that plants can reproduce. They’re not doing it on purpose to aid the human race, of course, but without all those innumerable journeyings to and fro between the blossoms we would not have important things. Like food. Like apples and oranges. Lemons and carrots. Avocados. Almonds. Blueberries. Clover. Tomatoes. Orchids. Thirty percent of our food crops. Something like ninety percent of wildflowers.

Check out www.pollinator.org. for more info on helping pollinators.