Pine & Pea Pollen under the Microscope 🔬

Following my previous vegetable pollen post, today we will be looking at pea and pine pollen. Honestly, I didn’t expect them to look so different to the vegetable pollen. In fact there are many more different looking types of pollen than I expected. It really is truly amazing how something so tiny look the same with the naked eye, yet so different under the microscope.

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The pea flower is a pretty little thing don’t you think? When I searched up ‘pea pollen’, there doesn’t seem to be much information on it. In fact, Google thinks I misspelt it and keeps offering me ‘bee pollen’. Oh that reminds me, I purchased snow pea seeds quite some time ago which I have yet to use. It states on the package to be sowed by August this year. I better get planting soon.

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Let us check out the pea pollen under the microscope. At first glance the shape reminded me of pills. But when you look closer you can see little bumps along the middle of the pill shaped pollen. It seems pretty bizarre.

Having a closer look and adjusting the iris diaphragm, it appears there are three little bumps per pollen along the middle cross section. Ah dammit, just saw I stuffed up the gif once again lol I was too focused on capturing the details on the pollen.

Time to check out the pine pollen.

This looks very similar to the vegetable pollen we had previously looked at. Except for the two slightly more transparent bubble looking things on each end. At first I thought maybe the pollen was germinating? However this was not true, those bubble like features are actually air sacks to help them travel further. Talk about an advance pollen.

Vesiculate Pollens: Pollens with air sacks to increase bouyancy. The sacks are typically two per grain at the bottom of the grain, but may also be doughnut shaped under the grain.

Vesiculate pollens are found in the Abies (Fir), Picea (Spruce), Pinus (Pine), Podocarpus (Podocarpus), and Tsuga (Hemlock). Source

Here is a closer look of the pollen.

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_{Unless cited, all other imagines & gifs belong to @supersoju
References:
Pollen File}