What is the yellow powder on flowers and what does it look like up close? (BioE80 Spr2015)

May 27, 2015 • 11:43 AM UTC

Unknown Location

140x Magnification

Unknown

katiepl

Learn about the author...

1posts

0comments

0locations

If you look closely at a flower, you’ll notice some yellow powdery stuff, often on the ends of stick-like structures coming out of the flower. That yellow powder is called pollen, and the stick that holds it is called a stamen. Flowers reproduce when bees or other pollinators carry pollen between flowers. But what does pollen really look like? Is it the same color when you look at it up close?
I found a plant covered in small white flowers with yellow pollen, and decided to investigate this. I pressed a foldscope sticker to the yellow part, and was able to collect some of the pollen:

I put my slide into the foldscope, focused it, and saw this:

Then, I was able to zoom in even further:

I was amazed to see that the pollen was not yellow-colored up close! I wonder what makes it look yellow when it is on flowers? I was also surprised by the shape of the pollen up close. I had expected it might be round, since it simply looked like a crumbly powder with my naked eye. However, pollen had a more interesting shape than I had predicted. It looked kind of like a stretched-out donut. I wonder what about that shape allows pollen to stick to bees and reproduce?
Evidently, on the macro (big) and micro (small) scales objects can appear totally different and unrelated to each other!
Katie Plummer

What is the yellow powder on flowers and what does it look like up close? (BioE80 Spr2015)

katiepl

More Posts from katiepl