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Do Brussels sprouts need pollination?

Some questions surprise me because they reappear so frequently, but what is it with Brussels sprouts? For decades I’ve heard nothing about Brussels sprouts, but suddenly every third visitor wants to know how to pollinate them. I do not understand.

I endure Brussels sprouts mostly because my husband likes them and they are good for me. But I will eat them only fresh off the stalk. A Brussels sprout that is frozen or otherwise tampered with goes through a mystical transformation that makes it truly vile. It’s not the flavor so much as the texture—a mouthful of bland green mush—that really gets to me. Shiver.

But if you are the type of person that wants to ensure the survival of said mush, you should know that Brussels sprouts can be pollinated by both honey bees and native bees. The plant belongs to the Brassicaceae family that includes cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collard greens, and kohlrabi. The odd thing is that Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, savoy, and Chinese kale are all in the same species, Brassica oleracea—they are merely different cultivars (cultivated varieties).

This means that when growing the plants for seed, you must keep the different cultivars separated from each other because they can readily cross-pollinate. For example, a broccoli might cross with a Brussels sprout and yield yet another smelly cabbagy thing to fester in our produce drawers. The amount of separation should be at least a mile because, as you know, honey bees are completely willing to span that distance.

People unfamiliar with plant propagation will often say they buy seeds, grow a sprout (or a carrot or a turnip), and never see a flower. So who needs pollination? Good question except they are forgetting that the seed wasn’t manufactured by Home Depot. They were grown by a farmer who maintained the plants until they flowered. Then the honey bees were brought in to do their thing. What a system.

So the short answer is “yes,” Brussels sprouts need pollination. Without pollination there is no seed. And without the seed we would have no more Brussels sprouts . . . perhaps not such a bad thing after all.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Fresh Brussels sprouts are fine, but don’t try anything funny. Wikimedia Commons photo by Eric Hunt.
Fresh Brussels sprouts are fine, but don’t try anything funny. Wikimedia Commons photo by Eric Hunt.

Confidential to “Typo Police”: Thanks. Indeed I have only one husband.

Why do honey bees need fur?

Fur. I think of it as hair, but fair enough. The fur on a bee is vital to its survival. Virtually all bees have branched hairs somewhere on their bodies. In fact, the presence of those branched hairs is one of the major ways bees can be distinguished from other insects.

Bees are vegetarians. They collect nectar from flowers for their energy needs, but they also collect pollen which supplies them—and their young—with protein, lipids, and nutrients. As a bees goes from flower to flower, pollen grains get caught in the branched hairs, which facilitates their collection by the bees. Bees carry pollen in different ways, but a honey bee uses her hairy front and middle legs like brushes to comb the pollen off her body and pack it into hairy recesses on her rear legs. These hairy recesses are called pollen baskets or corbiculae.

Thanks to hairy . . . or furry . . . bodies, the bees inadvertently leave some of the pollen grains behind each time they visit another flower, which is the primary mechanism of insect pollination. Without those furry bodies flitting from flower to flower, life on earth would be very different indeed.

Things we forget to remember

Thanksgiving Day in the United States is traditionally celebrated with an over-sized meal based on a stuffed turkey. Since the turkey always takes center stage, many refer to it as “turkey day.” However, to be fair, we should call it “bee day.”

Think about bees as you eat broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, squash, turnips, avocados, eggplant, or leeks. Does your stuffing contain sunflower seeds, onion, or parsley? Will you be having cranberry sauce or blueberry muffins? Or how about pickles?—cucumbers, dill, and mustard seed are all pollinated by bees.

Do you see any carrots or celery? The seeds needed to plant these crops required pollination by bees as well. And the tomatoes were helped along by bumble bees.

Do you have a fruit bowl on the table? Does it have oranges, tangerines, plums, or persimmons? And what about those mixed nuts, including almonds, cashews, and macadamias? Do you have a cheese plate that includes a wedge of honey and crackers with caraway seeds?

And if your pumpkin pie contains pumpkin, allspice, nutmeg, vanilla, or cinnamon, you can thank bees for every one of them. And besides apples, your apple pie may contain all those goodies as well as currants and a piece of cheddar cheese on the side.

That’s right. You can’t forget the dairy stock that ate clover and alfalfa, the seeds of which were produced by bees. The milk from those animals provided the butter, sour cream, yogurt, whipping cream, half and half, and all the cheeses that went with the rest of the meal. And don’t forget the coffee, some of which is bee-pollinated as well.

The table itself may be covered with a cotton tablecloth, courtesy of the bees, and topped with beeswax candles.

Unfortunately, both cotton textiles and beeswax have been largely replaced with man-made materials coaxed from oil . . . which got me to thinking. It seems that some oil is really old—made from ancient sea life that drifted to the ocean floors—but there are more recent deposits that came from the Jurassic period (180-140 million years ago) and the Cretaceous period (140-65 million years ago). Oil from these periods can be age-dated using the presence of a certain chemical that comes from angiosperms (flowering plants).

Since bees evolved along with flowering plants starting about 100-120 million years ago, it is very possible that bees are at least partially responsible for pollinating the plants which formed the more recent oil deposits, particularly those that accumulated during or after the Cretaceous period. As time progressed, more and more angiosperms became dependent on bee pollinators, which in turn allowed them to become more and more prolific, which in turn made more and more oil. And when the bees’ lives were over, their little bodies added to the deposits as well.

So if you’re driving to grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving—or only to your local restaurant—just think: bees may be responsible for pushing your car along the road . . . which was also made from oil. You gotta love ‘em.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Daffodil seeds are easy to get

Rusty,

Daffodils have lost the need to be pollinated because they are grown from bulbs! The only reason they still have flowers is that the bulbs are selected from those that produce the nicest blooms. Plant breeders keep seed-fertile varieties in order to continue hybridizing. But these don’t make it to market: only bulbs grown out from them will be sold.

You don’t see a lot of bees or other pollinators on hybrid roses, either. They are propagated almost entirely from cuttings. Incidentally, if your hybrid rose gets frost-killed, but the rootstock survives, you’ll have a nice multiflora with tiny white blossoms, heady scent and a cloud of bees around it.

It is incorrect to say that daffodils have lost the need to be pollinated because they are grown from bulbs. No cause and effect relationship exists between the two. Many, many plants can reproduce by either vegetative or sexual means, but plants that are reproduced by bulbs, corms, rhizomes, or leaf cuttings do not lose their ability to reproduce by seed because of it. In fact, except for occasional mutations, each vegetative reproduction is a clone of its progenitor with the same seed-producing ability.

What daffodils (and many other flowers) have lost in the process of selection and hybridization is the ability to attract insects with sweet-tasting nectar. The loss came about when breeders selecting for specific flower traits ignored the nectar-producing capabilities. But most daffodils still produce viable pollen and seed.

Plant breeders are not keeping the fertile varieties all to themselves. They have cultivars which are particularly useful, but they are not sacrosanct. When I was breeding daffodils I started with just the blooms in my garden. It is easy to get seed: just take a toothpick and transfer the pollen from one flower to the stigma of a different flower. It is the same thing the pollinators would do if they were still attracted to the blooms.

You can tell when you get seed because the ovary gets really large; a seed-bearing daffodil is easy to spot and the seeds are big and easy to handle. You can replant the seed right away or store it and plant it in the fall. In the spring you will get a new daffodil plant that looks a lot like a blade of grass. And in seven or eight years it will bloom for the first time—which is the real reason you can’t find daffodil seeds at your local garden store: who would buy them?

Sometimes daffodils will cross after a visit by a curious insect. If you have a lot of daffodils, check for a very fat ovary after the flowers have withered and dried. Collect the pods before the the seeds drop to the ground.

Now about roses. You say if your rootstock survives “you’ll have a nice multiflora with tiny white blossoms, heady scent and a cloud of bees around it.” That may be true, but it depends on the rootstock that was used. Different rootstocks are favored for certain climates and soil types.

Nevertheless, if your rootstock had pink flowers before it was grafted, it will have pink flowers if allowed to re-sprout. If the rootstock was a variety not particularly attractive to insects, it won’t suddenly become attractive if allowed to re-sprout. The important point is that you don’t know what kind of flower you will get from your rootstock unless you know what species or cultivar it is.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Daffodils
Daffodils

Wednesday wordphile: pollination ecology

Pollination ecology is the study of the complex relationships between pollinators and the plants they pollinate. Pollination ecologists study the life cycles, distribution, and behaviors of the individuals–both plants and pollinators–as well as the entire ecosystem in which the individuals operate.

Pollinators can be animals or they can be physical forces such as wind, rain, and gravity. In order for ecologists to understand these relationships, they may study how long a flower stays open, which pollinators visit and how often, and whether a plant has an alternative method of fertilization if the regular pollinators don’t appear. They may need to examine how large a population has to be before effective pollination can take place, other flowers that compete for the pollinators’ attention, and how far a pollinator is willing to travel to find a plant of the same species.

In our modern world, many factors are changing the dynamics between plants and their pollinators. Climate change is suspected of pushing bloom times and pollinator emergence out of sync, modern agriculture has destroyed much the land where native pollinators used to live, and invasive species of both the plant and animal kind have changed the population dynamics within ecosystems to the point where plants and pollinators are not finding each other.

The study of plant/pollinator relationships will become ever more vital as we attempt to feed the world of the future.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com