"For both. Watch this bee. You see, he pushes open the flower for
honey, but to get it he has to cover his legs with the pollen from the
anthers, which are placed down in this little lower part called a keel,
just where his legs and body will be covered. Then he comes out and
goes to another flower and carries this pollen, and really rubs it on
the stigma there as he crawls in and out, and takes more pollen, and
so goes on from one to another--a real servant, doing a real duty and
getting his pay as he goes."
"But he doesn't have to do it. The pollen would fall on the stigma
anyway, wouldn't it?"
"It might with the sweet-pea, but even if it did, the pollen from the
same flower is not as good as the pollen from another flower from a
different plant, and the seed would be poor and the plants would grow
weaker every year. There are many insects that act as servants to
the flowers, and the wind is one of the servants, too. It shakes the
corn-tassel so that the pollen falls on the silk and makes the ear, and
it carries the pollen of one stalk to the silk of another--sometimes
from one field to another."
"But, of course, the bee doesn't know that he does it," said Prue, who
was still very intently watching the little servants of the sweet-pease.
"I am not so certain of that," the Chief Gardener said musingly. "The
flower must know, for it dresses in bright colors so that the bee may
see it, and offers honey as pay for his work. And if the flower knows,
why shouldn't the bee?"
"But don't you think it might all just happen so?" asked Davy.
"I don't think anything in nature just 'happens so,' Davy, and I am
sure that the bee's work for the flower doesn't, for there are too
many flowers that would have no seed and would die out if it were not
for the bees that carry the pollen, and most of these flowers have
grown just to fit in every way the especial little bee, or big bee, or
insect, that comes to work for them. There are some flowers, like the
sweet-pea, that the bee cannot get into without getting pollen on his
legs, and there are others that drop it upon his back. Some flowers
have stamens that wither before the pistil is ready for the pollen. In
such flowers the little servants go from one to the other--from a new
flower to an old one--carrying the pollen which would not be of any use
in the flower where it grew."
"And is that really all that the flower's pretty color and sweet smell
and delicious honey are for?" asked little Prue, "just to get bees to
work for it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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