Flower Dissection/Pollination

    This week's lab was filled with pollination and learning about flower dissection. We did our own pollination with our plants this week. Shown to the right, you can see an updated picture of our flowers, and the supplies used to pollinate our plant- bees and big wooden sticks. What we did was insert the wooden stick into the bee and manipulate the pollination of what usually occurs with the bees and the petals on our plant. This was new to me and gave me an insight on how bees pollinate plants. The process of pollination by bees helps plants grow, and I have never gotten this much information from it before. Flower dissection was breaking down the different parts of flowers- male and female.

●      Female parts: pistil which includes the stigma, style, and ovary. 

●      Stigma: the part of the pistil where pollen germinates 

●      Ovary: the enlarged basal portion of the pistil where ovules are produced 

●      Male parts: stamen which contains the anther and filament. 

●      Anther: the part of the stamen where pollen is produced. Another holds the pollen (sperm) of the plant. 

●      Filament: the filament supports the anther. 

●      Petal: the parts of a flower that are often conspicuously colored 

●      Sepal: the outer parts of the flower (often green and leaf-like)

    Pollination was not new to me, but it was something that my knowledge got expanded on this week. The process we did with the bees and our plants is what took my knowledge on pollination to the next level. This was the following process we went through-

●      Making bee sticks: push the toothpick into the thorax (middle) 

●      If a dried bee has broken apart, even a portion can be used to make an effective bee stick. 

●      Pollinate with bee sticks by brushing the bee over flowers to pick up and distribute pollen. 

●      The bee sticks must be transferred back and forth among different plants for cross-pollination.

After this process, I know what the bees do to affect and help plants grow. It makes so much more sense now because we physically did the process ourselves. Before, I just knew that bees pollinated plants, but not much more about it. Now, we have basically been bees ourselves because of the steps we took to pollinate our plants. This was awesome and very fascinating to me!

I can take a lot of what we did this week and apply it to my future teaching. We did some activities during the lab that I feel can be fun for students and that they can learn from. This includes the fortune teller sea turtle activity and the pollinating bee activity. The seat turtle activity helped show how much sea turtles must go through, and only about one in a thousand sea turtles actually survive. Those activities were fun but led into deeper conversations where the students can take away new information which I found important.