The Bee & The Pollen

A beehive is almost a necessity in apple and orange orchards. The bee is paid for its labors by the large amounts of pollen she carries away to her larval or baby bees in the hive. Although she tucks a great deal of this into a special little pollen basket in her leg, she inevitably becomes dusted with pollen as she clambers around in the bloom, and thus carries a vast amount—sometimes up to half her weight—from one flower to another, inadvertently pollinating hundreds of blossoms a day.

Flowers have almost as many devices for dousing pollen on bees or fixing it to their bodies, as there are kinds of flowers visited by these industrious little insects. In the flower the pollen is borne in little tubes called anthers, which open by pores when ripe from these the pollen shakes out like talcum powder. Some flowers have little piston systems, so that as soon as the bee treads among the organs of the flower the anther comes down like a mallet or piano key and gently strikes the insect, dusting the powder over its body.

Others conceal their nectaries in such a way that the bee, to get at them, has to clamber over the anthers and thus scrapes pollen on her abdomen. One of the most marvelous of all cases of mutual dependence in Nature is that of a little moth that lays its eggs only in the ovary of the yucca plant. The hatching larvae eat some of the seeds, then bore their way out and escape. But no seeds will ripen if the flower is not pollinated.

The moth herself performs this rite, quite deliberately. Her mouthparts are specially modified for rolling pollen into little balls, and after she has laid her eggs in the ovary she collects pollen from the anthers and carefully crams it down on the stigma, or receiving surface of the ovary. Without the moth the flower would fail to reproduce itself. Without the seeds the moth larvae would die. The act of pollination the moth performs is as expert as if she had a college degree in plant breeding. This moth was pollinating yuccas at least as far back as the last Ice Age.

Yet not until 1717 was the first plant hybrid made by man's hand, when Thomas Fairchild, in England, placed the pollen of a carnation on the female flower of a Sweet William. Since then 4,000 crosses have been made between China asters; 8000 sorts of tulip have been produced by crossbreeding, while the rose leads the world with 15,000 experimental crosses. Most of this work has been done since 1900, for only with the discovery of Mendel's Law, in 1866, did breeding become an exact science.

By: davidbunch

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Other articles: temporary job agencies Jobs Princess Cruise Line fbi agent salary