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In most flowers, with the exception of the orchids, the stamens and pollen are plainly visible; but who ever sees the anthers of the blue-flag? Surely none but the analytical botanist and the companion insect to whom it is so artfully adjusted and so demonstrative. This insect is likely to be either a bumblebee or a species of large fly.
Later still in summer we find a rose in the same surprising case, while not far off is a columbine bearing pollen on its spurs instead of its anthers. What family tie is betrayed in all this?
In very many other cases, though there be no special mechanical contrivance to prevent the stigma of a flower receiving its own pollen, yet, as C. C. Sprengel has shown, and as I can confirm, either the anthers burst before the stigma is ready for fertilisation, or the stigma is ready before the pollen of that flower is ready, so that these plants have in fact separated sexes, and must habitually be crossed.
In early spring when the plants and bushes that furnish the roots and barks of most of the tonics are in bloom, and the bees gather the pollen, that honey should partake in a degree of the same properties and be good medicine. In the summer it should aid digestion, and in the fall cure rheumatism and blood disorders." "Say you try it!" urged the carpenter. "I want a lot of the fall kind.
In the geranium, the stamen and the pistil in the same flower mature at different times. In some species, as among the lilies, the style is so long that the pollen could not fall upon it without artificial aid. Some flowers are so constructed that they can be fertilized by certain kinds of insects and by no others; among these are the orchids and our clovers and milk-weeds.
With vigorous, healthy plants and on light, sunny days, it can be accomplished by jarring the plants near midday. This generally throws enough pollen into the air so that an abundance of it reaches each receptive stigma. With less vigorous plants and on dark days it is necessary to hand pollinate the flowers.
I suspect that it must arise from the pollen of a distinct variety having a prepotent effect over a flower's own pollen; and that this is part of the general law of good being derived from the intercrossing of distinct individuals of the same species.
In these recesses, which are private estates, each mother works by herself, jealous of her property and of her privacy. Every elsewhere, traffic is free to all. The exits and entrances in the working fortress provide a spectacle of the highest interest. A harvester arrives from the fields, the feather-brushes of her legs powdered with pollen. If the door be open, the Bee at once dives underground.
This is all that you will find to represent the stamens of the flower. When these masses of pollen, or pollinia as they are called, are within the flower, the knob at the bottom is covered by a little lid, shutting them in like the lid of a box, and just below this lid you will see two yellowish lumps, which are very sticky.
We might have taken the case of insects visiting flowers for the sake of collecting pollen instead of nectar; and as pollen is formed for the sole purpose of fertilisation, its destruction appears to be a simple loss to the plant; yet if a little pollen were carried, at first occasionally and then habitually, by the pollen-devouring insects from flower to flower, and a cross thus effected, although nine-tenths of the pollen were destroyed it might still be a great gain to the plant to be thus robbed; and the individuals which produced more and more pollen, and had larger anthers, would be selected.
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