Part 2

It must be a fine thing to go to a flower and take a drink of honey whenever you wish; but what will you say when I tell you the bees get bread as well as honey from the flowers?

Yet this is what happens. You could not live upon honey alone; neither could a bee. Perhaps you could not live upon bread and honey; but you could if you were a bee, that is, beebread and honey.

For beebread is much more nutritious than the bread we eat. In fact, it takes the place of meat and eggs and milk and all the other things we take such pains to get.

You do not see where a bee finds bread in a flower?

That is because you are not a bee. If you were, you would know at once.

Suppose you watch a bee go into a morning-glory.

She will be in a great hurry, and you will have to keep your eyes open, or all will be over before you know what has happened.

She will suck up the honey, and then very likely she will turn around and around on the white pole-like part that stands up in the middle of the flower. She is not doing this for fun, nor because she is confused and does not know which way to go next.

She is gathering fine flour of which to make beebread.

Put your finger into the morning-glory and you, too, may gather this fine flour.

When you take your finger out there will be something like fine white powder clinging to it. Well, that is the flour from which the bee makes her beebread. We call it pollen, and if we look closely we shall find it is stored in five tiny boxes.

These boxes, which are called anthers, open by a slit along one side, and the bee puts her funny little feet into the slits and scrapes out the pollen, which she moistens with honey and packs into baskets on her hindermost legs, or fastens to the hairs on the under side of her body.

Then she goes home and packs her load away in the hive for future use.

You see it is not much trouble to make beebread—that is, if you know how. It does not have to be raised or baked, yet I doubt if you or I would be able to make it so that a bee would consider it fit to eat.

These anthers are held up on long white stalks which grow to the inside of the flower cup, and which are named filaments.

Since there are five anthers there are five filaments.

We call the whole thing, anther and filament, a stamen.

But this is not all there is to be found in a morning-glory flower. There is something else, and if it were not for this something else we should not have the fun of learning about honey and stamens, because there would be none! Both honey and stamens exist because of this something else.

It is in the very center of the flower, and the stamens stand about it in a circle. It stands up like a pole and has a knob at the top. The knob sticks out above the stamens as a rule. When the flower cup falls, the stamens fall too, because the filaments grow fast to it. But this something else does not fall. It stays on the vine, and you can see it better after the flower cup has fallen.

We call it the pistil. It has neither honey nor pollen, yet on its account the bees and butterflies visit the flowers.

Here is its picture, and you may look at it as carefully as you please. The knob at the top is called the stigma, the long, slender part is called the style, and the round bottom the ovary.

If you look over all the vine you will make a discovery. You will find a great many of these pistils in different stages of growth. When the flower cup first falls off, the pistil is very small and has its style and stigma. Then the style and stigma fall, and only the ovary remains. This grows larger and plumper, and you tell me it is the seed-pod, and is full of seeds. You are right about that; it is the seed-pod, and the pistil is the part where the seeds grow.

So now you see how very important it is, and I would advise you to take another look at it.

If there were no seeds there could be no more plants, so the growth of the seed is a matter of great importance.

When the seed first begins to form it is tiny and soft and delicate. It is attached to the inside of the ovary, and we do not then call it a seed, but an ovule. The word “ovule” means “little egg,” and the ovules are really the eggs of the plant, as you will agree if you think a moment.

If all goes well, the tiny, soft ovule becomes a large, hard seed. But it cannot do this alone; it needs help. Probably you never could guess what helps it, so I will tell you at once: it is the pollen.

If a pollen grain can unite with an ovule, the two thus joined together can grow into a seed. So you see the flower does not provide pollen for the use of the bee alone. It makes it for its own seed-children.

But the bee is the messenger that carries the pollen to the ovule. You see the pollen grain of our morning-glory lies in the anther below the stigma, and it must reach the stigma so as to find its way down to the ovary. Just how all this comes about you will know later; only now remember that the pollen must get to the stigma, and that the bee puts it there. Not on purpose, though. The bee collects pollen for her own use, but in doing so touches the stigma with her pollen-covered body, and some of the pollen grains stick to the stigma instead of remaining on the bee.