Barberry Manners
ONE who is unfamiliar with the remarkable doings of blossoms in association with their insect honey-sippers might consider it somewhat surprising to attribute "manners" to a flower. But who that has seen the sage-blossom clap its bee visitor on the back as she ushers him in at the threshold of her purple door, marking him for her own with her dab of yellow pollen as she almost pushes him into the nectar feast within; who that has witnessed the almost roguish demonstration which the tiny andromeda-bell extends to the sipping bee at its doorway—who that has seen these can any longer doubt that blossoms have "manners" as well as we bigger, more conscious beings? Yes, manners, unquestionably—"bad manners," it would almost seem, in some instances, as, for example, in this andromeda blossom-bell, which, in its perfume and its nectar, deliberately invites the tiny Andrena bee, only to deluge its little, black, hairy face with a smothering shower of dusty pollen. A remarkable style of etiquette, surely, that is, from our human standpoint. But in the realm of Flora the standards of decorum, so far as greeting is concerned, are not governed by artificial whim. There is no "smart set" to dictate and set the fashion for others less smart to follow. Each individual flower is a law unto itself as to the method of its greeting to its especial insect friend. The blossom etiquette of welcome is literally as "old as the hills," and has come down with little change from an ancestry which dates back perhaps to a period when there were no human "ancestors" on the globe. So these "manners" are natural and original, to say the least, even if they are so queer sometimes. What would you think of a friend whose hospitable smile and welcome at his doorway should invite you thither only that your foot might touch a trigger and let fall the floor beneath you, while at the same time you are half suffocated with an explosion of a bushel of yellow corn meal? Yet such is something like the spectacular reception which the lotus clover, the desmodium, and the genista flowers consider the most expressive form of welcome. But the little bees seem to enjoy it, and go again and again to each successive flower, well knowing what the result will be, and apparently "touching off the trigger" without a tremor, or even holding their breath. But they and their foreparents for thousands of years have got accustomed to it, and I half imagine that the baby bee, even in his first visit to one of these blossoms, knows precisely what will happen. Pop! pop! go the exploding flowers, one after the other, at each touch of the bee, throwing up a cloud of yellow pollen which covers the bodies of the insects until they are as dusty as little millers.
There is an endless variety in these various welcomes among the flowers, and our barberry has one of the queerest of them all. Poets of all ages have loved to dwell upon the flowers—their "swete smels," exquisite forms, fragrance, and colors. The droning bees in an environment of fragrant bloom have moved many a poetic pen to inspiration. But it is not often that the bards have seen deep enough into the floral mysteries to immortalize the doings of the blossoms.
I recall one such allusion, however, with reference to this mischievous blossom of the barberry. How well old Hosea Biglow knew its pranks!
"All down the loose-walled lanes in archin' bowers
The barb'ry droops its strings o' golden flowers,
Whose shrinkin' hearts the school-gals love to try
With pins. They'll worry yourn so, boys, bime-by."
Those "shrinkin' hearts" of the barberry blossom, so long the wonder and amusement of children, including many children of adult growth, have, so far as I know, herein found their first and only historian—historian, but not interpreter. For Hosea Biglow, nor his literary parent, James Russell Lowell, never dreamed of the significance of this strange spectacle in the shrinkin' hearts of the barberry bloom when surprised with the point of a pin.
But the bee can tell us all about it. He has known this singular trick in the barberry for ages, and kept the secret all to himself. Only comparatively recently (1859 or thereabouts) did the secret leak out, when Darwin, by the previous hints of several other philosophers, discovered the key which unlocked the mystery of this as well as thousands of other similar riddles among the flowers.
These strange "manners" of the blossoms had then a deep vital principle at their base. They had not always been thus, but had gradually, through long ages of time, changed and modified their shapes, colors, odors, nectar, and their manners for one purpose—to insure their pollen being conveyed away upon the bodies of insects and carried to a second flower, and there placed upon the stigma to insure fertilization and development of the seed.
"In archin' bowers"
The plans, devices, tricks, and pranks by which flowers accomplish this result are past belief. I have indicated only a few by way of a hint, and in previous papers on the bluebottle and figwort have described others, but none quite similar to the barberry.
Fig. 1
We all know the barberry, the prickly, thorny barberry, whether with its "strings o' golden flowers" or its drooping clusters of brilliant scarlet acid berries. But each one of those berries is but a token of a bee's visit, as we shall presently see. At Fig. 1 I have shown a plan of the barberry blossom seen from below, its yellow sepals and petals open, and opposite each of the inner set, and pressed against it, a stamen. This stamen is shown below in three stages—closed, partly open, and fully open—the queer little ear-shaped lids finally drawn up, showing the pollen-pockets, and also withdrawing a portion of the pollen from the cavity. At the centre is seen the circular tip of the ovary which finally becomes the berry—that is, when the little scheme here planned has been fulfilled. This circular form represents the tip of the ovary, and the little toothed rim the stigma. Now what is the intention here expressed? This construction represents a plan, first, to invite a bee—this is done by its color, its fragrance, and its nectar, which is secreted in a gland at the base of each petal, near the centre of the flower; secondly, to make that bee bear away the pollen; thirdly, to cause that same bee to place this pollen on the stigma rim of the next flower he visits. In Fig. 2 we see how beautifully this plan is carried out by the insect, without his suspecting how perfectly he has been utilized. At A we see the same flower cut open sideways, the waiting, expectant stamens tucked away at the sides, leaving a free opening to the base of the flower. Now comes our bee. He must needs hang back downward to sip at the drooping flower. As his tongue enters, and finally touches the base of these stamens, clap! they come one after another against his tongue and face, and there deposit their load of pollen (B). The bee, who has doubtless got over his surprise at this demonstration—if, indeed, he ever had any—now flies to another blossom, perhaps on the same cluster (C). Entering it as before, the notched edge of the stigmatic rim comes in contact with the pollen on his tongue and face, and the flower is thus fertilized by pollen from another barberry blossom, the intention of the flower now perfectly realized in cross-fertilization.
Fig. 2
The seeds from cross-fertilized flowers are almost invariably more vigorous, and thus yield more vigorous plants, than those of flowers fertilized with their own pollen, and this is why most flowers have necessarily developed some means by which cross-fertilization can be secured. And this has been done through evolution working on the lines of natural selection, those seedlings which had originally happened, by a variation in the flower, to be thus favored by some chance peculiarity which insured cross-fertilization, winning in the struggle with the previous weaker individuals, and finally supplanting them altogether.