When I was trying to get pollen I found this well camouflaged spider hanging around:
Not sure if it’s a pollinator or it’s lurking around for pollinators…… Even after avoiding our spider friend, plucking flowers and squashing anthers did not work very well — the pollen was surprisingly hard to find!! I had to take the cello-tape directly to the flowers and brush them with it. Anyway, here’s its pollen:
For scale bars, I used the method described in this post about measuring with a Foldscope . Badam pollen looks really tiny and delicate (only one of those things is actually true). I estimate the pollen grains to be about 25 microns in length (and as far as I can tell, has 3 furrows on the coat so, as expected, is a Tricolpate ). You can see that from this video where I go up an down in Z:
Here’s the pollen at the same magnification (200×200 micron squares) as other things: