This photograph shows the great hybridizer at work.
She is on one of the single roses, her hairy body spread over the stamens which, with their yellow anthers, look like a circular bed of tulips. In the middle of the circle, where her right foot rests, is the stigma.
If you will sometime take a hand lens and watch a bee at work (and if you don’t get too close she will pay no attention to you), you will notice the clumsy way she crawls about, knocking the pollen off the stamens and getting her body covered with the yellow dust. As you watch, any feeling of there being some mystery about cross fertilization will be dispelled. How this same bumble-bee could crawl across another rose blossom without leaving a trail of yellow pollen on its stigma would be the mystery!
Since the earliest days of the world of plants and insects, the bumble-bee and her ancestors have been at work mixing the pollen on hundreds of different plants and playing, doubtless, a perfectly gigantic role in the creation of the flowering plants which now cover vast areas of the globe.
It is perhaps an idle speculation, but it would be interesting to know how many plants would become extinct were some disease or parasite to exterminate the bees.
THE TELLTALE MILKWEED POLLEN
(Bombus sp.)