HORTICULTURE Pollination is one of nature’s most amazing phenomena. Most of us take it for granted. Yet the act (or acts) of pollination are responsible for fully a third of all the food we eat and contribute over $34 billion to the United States economy annually. Pollination is the process where the seed of the plant it fertilized. The role of the pollinator is to facilitate the transfer of pollen to the ovary of the flower to create a fertilized seed. In some cases, it’s the seed we eat such as in nuts. In most cases however, it’s the fruit that grows around the seed we are after as in apples, peaches, tomatoes, etc... In the absence of pollinators, we would not only be hungry, our whole ecology would collapse. The food we eat from pollinators is a tiny fraction of the variety and abundance of seeds and fruits that many species in the wild rely on as well. While we often think of the honeybee when we hear the word pollinator, literally hundreds of other species of insects are involved in the process of pollination as
Bee Keeping 10 HOME RIVER VALLEY
POLLINATION
