Top facts about Polination.

MrsDTB here! The following is a short journal entry from MasterKAF. Over to you sir…

I read a thing on Q-files, so here are my top 3 facts I learned.

The smallest flower in the world is called Wolffia, but you might know it as duckweed, yes, that annoying stuff that covers your pond is a flower.

Dandelions can self reproduce, but insects may carry the pollen from one flower to another. However, dandelions have both male and female organs on the same flower. The flowers can pollinate themselves. Thus it only takes one dandelion to reproduce itself and spread quickly over a lawn on a windy day. 

Some flowers are male and female and some are just one gender. This from Q-files: “The male reproductive part of a flower, consisting of an anther and filament, is called a stamen. Pollen is produced in the bag-like anthers on stalks, called filaments. Each pollen grain contains a male cell.”
“The female reproductive organ of a flower, consisting of an ovary, style and stigma, is called a carpel. The female cells or ovules (eggs) are in the ovary, a fleshy part at the flower’s base. A taller part, called the style, sticks up from this, with the stigma at its top. Some flowers have one carpel, while others have a cluster of carpels, called a pistil.”

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All About Bees

This blog is all about bees. How on earth did we decide to write about bees? We watched a documentary called Cities: Natures New Wild. There was a bit about bees and how they had to commute a long way from their nest to get to the flowers. At the end of the programme, there was a message about how we need to make our cities greener to encourage wildlife. A campaign called 10 times greener was mentioned and we decided to look it up online. It turned out that the campaign was run by Friends of the Earth, so we went to visit their website. That’s where we found out much more about bees and how we can help to save them.

We ordered a Bee Saver Kit from the website and it arrived on Friday. The kit contained seeds for the garden, a pamphlet, a bee identification poster and a garden planner. We used the planner to choose some plants for the garden. These were Hellebore, Rosemary, Chives, Raspberry, Runner Beans and Hebe. This will give us some flowers for the next few months to attract more bees into the garden.

You can find out more about the campaign here: https://friendsoftheearth.uk/bees