National Pollinator Week is a good opportunity to talk with consumers about the importance of pollinators to agriculture, Paul Schlegel said in Tuesday’s Newsline (June 22, 2016) . “Crops like strawberries and apples and cherries and others depend on pollination for farmers to be able get them to the market,” Schlegel said. “Pollinator week is a way of educating the public on how many pollinators there are. It’s not just honey bees, it can be butterflies and birds and other things.”
 
The American Farm Bureau Federation is a member of the Honey Bee Health Coalition, a group working to help minimize losses to honey bee colonies across the United States. Those losses have increased in recent years due to a variety of factors.