pollination

As our first beekeeping summer winds down, Eric (the neurotic beekeeper) harvested a very small amount of comb honey to eat with our own apples for the new year. There's a victory there - the bees have done very well, building up to a healthy population with plenty of honey for them and us. The real trick, of course, will be seeing them through the winter, but we're pleased with the first experience and thus far our signs look good. One of the things that allowing Eric to be the primary farmer on the beekeeping project has revealed is a fundamental difference in our approaches. Eric likes…
Science Magazine this week published the winners of this year's International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Self-Fertilization: Heiti Paves and Birger Ilau, Tallinn University of Technology Within its tiny white flowers, thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) does what most plants avoid: It fertilizes itself. Heiti Paves of Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia took this photograph of the flower with its pollen grains and ovaries stained blue to show the process in action. From the six pollen heads, the grains grow thin tubes toward the bean-shaped ovaries in the flower…