Word: pollenation
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From a plant's point of view, its flowers are only a means to an end. Their purpose is to attract pollen-carrying insects. Once the ovules are fertilized, the plant devotes its energies to nurturing the infant seeds and so does not produce as many flowers as it might. This is good for the plant's posterity, but bad for flower lovers...
...Herbert L. Everett of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station told about a frustrated petunia that remains forever virgin and so goes right on flowering. Dr. Everett crossed two widely different varieties of petunia. One of the offspring was sterile; the flowers had proper female ovules but no fertile male pollen. By crossing and recrossing, Dr. Everett can now make most kinds of petunias sterile. They flaunt their flowers hopefully, inviting bees to visit them. The bees come as usual, but the flowers cannot dust them with fertilizing pollen. So the desperate virgin, to its own frustration and to the delight...
...center of the painting is a sacred cornstalk, growing from what the Navajos call a "Shapen Cloud." Four benevolent Humpback deities stand at the outer edges, carrying staffs and black clouds filled with the fruits of the earth. Grouped around the cornstalk are eight gods and goddesses gathering healing pollen. On the north are the roundheaded earth gods, black and red, with white-coated, oblong-headed goddesses. On the south are blue and yellow water gods, with goddesses. Each god is laced with zigzag lightning, haloed with plumes of the red-tailed woodpecker, and armed with a bow and rattle...
...stirs, he stirs, he stirs, he stirs. Among the lands of dawning, he stirs, he stirs; The pollen of dawning, he stirs, he stirs...
Last summer the Jirps established their headquarters on a "nunatak," a rocky island in the Taku glacier. The scientists analyzed it for layers of summer pollen grains and proved that they could be used like the growth rings of a tree to measure the age of the ice. They explored the cold depths with drills and with shock waves from explosions. They took samples of wood from ancient trees left behind like exhumed corpses by the huge Mendenhall glacier, in the southeastern part of the field. When the ages of these trees have been measured by the carbon 14 method...