pollinium

He gave us the special description terminology for the orchids, such as pollinium and gynostemium.

The caudicle then bends and the pollinium is moved forwards and downwards.

The long column (botany) is touched in the process, resulting in the bee taking up pollinium at the very tip of the column.

The pollinia are superposed on a stipe (a cellular pollinium stalk), which is held by a viscid disc.

When the bee visits another flower, the flower is pollinated by the adhering pollinium on the bee.

The passageway constricts after a bee has entered, and holds it there for a few minutes, allowing the glue to dry and securing the pollinium.

It is morphologically similar to 'Restrepia', but differs in lacking hairlike attachments on a mobile labellum and having four pollinium instead of two.

While leaving the flower, it pulls the pollinium out of the anther, as it is connected to the viscidium by the caudicle or stipe.

When an insect touches an "antenna", this releases the bent pedicel which springs straight and fires the pollinium, sticky disc first, at the insect.

A pollinium is a waxy mass of pollen grains held together by the glue-like alkaloid viscin, containing both cellulosic strands and mucopolysaccharides.

When a bee lands on one of these, the disc adheres to its legs, and the pollinium is detached from the flower when the bee flies away.

Hawkmoths' Nocturnal Feast At night hawkmoths came to sip nectar from the orchid's seven-inch-long nectary tube, accidentally detaching the tagged pollinium in the process.

Each pollinium is connected to a filament which can take the form of a caudicle, as in Dactylorhiza or Habenaria, or a stipe, as in Vanda.

He explained the mechanism in which the pollen masses of the pollinium were connected by a bent stalk or pedicel to a sticky disc kept moist at the back of the flower.

When the pollinator enters another flower of the same species, the pollinium has taken such position that it will stick to the stigma of the second flower, just below the rostellum, pollinating it.

In the Orchidaceae family, unlike almost all other flowering plants, the single male anther at the tip of the 'column' produces pollen that is not free and powdery but held in waxy masses of two, four or six pellets called 'pollinium'.

By November, a specimen of the exotic South American Catasetum orchid Hooker had given to Darwin had shown its "truly marvellous" mechanism, by which it shot out a pollinium at any insect touching a part of the flower "with sticky gland always foremost".

Charles Darwin described in Fertilisation of Orchids how he "touched the antennæ of C. callosum whilst holding the flower at about a yard's distance from the window, and the pollinium hit the pane of glass, and adhered to the smooth vertical surface by its adhesive disc."