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Flowers and Insect Partners
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Flowers and Insect Partners
T is undoubtedly true that while the processes of
cross-pollenation
and the complicated devices of
flowers for insuring it can only be well taught to
older pupils and only fully understood in the college
laboratory, yet there are a few simple facts which
even the young child may know, as follows:
1. Pollen is needed to make the seeds grow; some
flowers need the pollen from other flowers of the
same kind, to make their seeds grow; but many
flowers also use the pollen from their own flowers to
pollenate their ovules, which grow into seeds.
2. Flowers have neither legs like animals nor wings like butterflies, to
go after pollen; so they give insects nectar to drink and pollen to eat,
and thus pay them for fetching and carrying the pollen.
I taught this to a four-year-old once in the following manner: A pine
tree in the yard was sifting its pollen over us and little Jack asked what
the yellow dust was; we went to the tree and saw where it came from,
then I found a tiny young cone and explained to him that this was a pine
blossom, and that in order to become a cone with seeds, it must have some
pollen fall upon it; and we saw how the wind sifted the pollen over it and
then we examined a ripe cone and found the seeds. Then we looked at
the clovers in the lawn. They did not have so much pollen and they were
so low in the grass that the wind could not carry it for them; but right
there was a bee. What was she doing? She was getting honey for her
hive or pollen for her brood, and she went from one clover head to
another; we caught her in a glass fruit jar, and found she was dusted with
pollen and that she had pollen packed in the baskets on her hind legs; and
we concluded that she carried plenty of pollen on her clothes for the
clovers, and that the pollen in her baskets was for her own use. After
that he was always watching the bees at work; and we found afterwards
that flowers had two ways of telling the insects that they wanted pollen.
One was by their color, for the dandelions and clovers hide their colors
during dark, rainy days when the bees remain in their hives. Then we
found the bees working on mignonette, whose blossoms were so small that
Jack did not think they were blossoms at all, and we concluded that the
mignonette called the bees by its fragrance. We found other flowers
which called with both color and fragrance; and this insect-flower
partnership remained a factor of great interest in the child's mind ever
after.
"Roly-poly honey-bee,
Humming in the clover,
Under you the tossing leaves,
And the blue sky over,
Why are you so busy, pray?
Never still a minute,
Hovering now above a flower,
Now half buried in it!"
—Julia C. R. Dorr.
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