Pollinator Week 2026

Pollinator Week 2026: Where to Find Events Near Portland

Pollinator Week started in 2007, when the U.S. Senate set aside a week in June to recognize how much of our food and landscape depends on bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, bats, and birds. One in three bites of food on your plate exists because something with wings visited a flower first. This year it runs June 22 through 28, and below you'll find a few events in the Portland metro area worth putting on your calendar, plus some ideas to support pollinators throughout the year.

Vancouver Pollinator Festival

Saturday, June 20, 2026, 9am - 3pm • Marshall Park, Vancouver, WA

This is the area's biggest Pollinator Week gathering, and it kicks off the weekend before the official week starts. Expect vendor booths, expert-led talks, crafts, games, and face painting, plus a kids market running the same morning. Good one for a full family outing.

Beaverton Pollinator Pathway Tour

Monday, June 22, 2026, 6pm • Beaverton City Library, Beaverton, OR
Friday, June 26, 2026, 6pm • Beaverton City Library, Beaverton, OR

A guided walking tour built around native plants and pollinator habitat, hosted with local businesses along the way. Smaller and more conversational than a festival, and a solid pick if you want specific plant ideas for your own yard.

Self-Guided Garden Tour

Monday through Sunday, June 22-28, 2026, 9am - 3pm • Multiple locations, Vancouver, WA

Clark Public Utilities maintains a series of pollinator gardens around Vancouver, and this self-guided tour lets you visit them on your own schedule across the full week. No registration, no fixed start time, just a good excuse for a few short walks.

West Linn Pollinator Week Celebration

Thursday, June 25, 2026, 4 - 7pm • Mary S. Young Pollinator Garden, West Linn, OR

West Linn's annual celebration includes educational booths, a plant giveaway, seed and gift sales, crafts, and a pollinator scavenger hunt for kids. Past years have brought in OSU Master Gardeners and the Portland Insectarium for hands-on talks, so it's worth checking their site closer to the date for the full lineup.

Kids Club Buzz-Worthy Planters at Al's Garden Center

Saturday, June 20, 2026, 9 am • Sherwood Location
Saturday, June 27, 2026, 11 am • Gresham & Wilsonville Locations

Celebrate Pollinator Month with a hands-on planting project designed just for kids. Children will plant a colorful container filled with pollinator-friendly annuals that help attract bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other beneficial visitors to the garden. It’s a fun, creative way to learn about pollinators while making something beautiful to take home and enjoy all summer long. Cost $10

Leach Botanical Garden

Leach Botanical Garden, tucked along Johnson Creek in outer Southeast Portland, has a four-season pollinator garden built specifically to feed bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds through every part of the year. It's open year-round, so it's an easy stop even if your calendar is already full this particular week. On June 20, the garden is hosting a sustainable gardening lecture from 5 - 7:30pm with Richie Steffen of the Elisabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden.

What helps, beyond showing up to events?

The folks at Bee City USA put together a list of low-effort, high-impact ways to support pollinators during the week and after it. A few worth doing regardless of what's on your calendar:

• Buy organic plants and seeds when you can. Ask your nursery whether their stock has been treated with systemic insecticides like neonicotinoids. These chemicals move through the whole plant, nectar and pollen included, so a "pollinator-friendly" tag on the label isn't the same as pesticide-free.
• Plant something native. Native plants and native pollinators evolved together, which means less guesswork for you and a better food match for them. A seed swap with neighbors or a homemade seed bomb works as well as a trip to the nursery.
• Join a bioblitz. Pollinator Week runs a community science project on iNaturalist where anyone can photograph pollinators and the flowers they're visiting, no entomology degree required. It's a good excuse to slow down in your own backyard.
• Leave a little habitat. Most native bees nest in the ground or in old stems, not in a hive. A bare patch of soil or a stand of dead flower stalks left standing through winter does more for them than a tidy lawn.

One week, all year

Pollinator Week is a good prompt, not a deadline. The native bees, most of whom are celebrating, don't live in hives at all. Most nest alone, in the ground or in a hollow stem, which is part of why we build differently at Bee Built: the equipment matters less than the habitat around it. Whatever you take from this week, a new plant, a seed bomb, a slightly messier corner of the yard, it keeps working long after June 28.