Vegetable Pollen under the Microscope 🔬

When I think of pollen, I think of allergies and hay fever. I also now think about the pollen basket the honey bee carries on its hind leg (as we had previously explored). I hate the smell of pollen that settles at dusk. It is extremely potent. A couple of times I had gone outside for less than a minute and ended up with swollen eyelids that last over 24 hours.

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Here I have a pre-prepared slide of ‘Vegetable Pollen’, hence the title of this post. I would like to state which vegetable but that is what was labelled on the slide. Silly I know. Anyways, let us check it out under the microscope.

Oh my I didn’t expect to see this. They look just like polka dots, kind of big looking too. It looks too perfect of a smooth circle to be real. Let us have a closer look.

Looking closer we can see it is not smooth. If you look carefully it appears fuzzy looking around the edges.

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I have another pollen slide that is similar. The slide is labelled as ‘Pollen of brassica campestris var oleifera’. It is a plant that is found in China and was eaten during time of famine.

China: stems and leaves eaten. The plant is also the source of colza oil, which is used in cooking. Source

It is small yellow flowering plant with what looks like only four petals per flower. It is pretty looking, I wonder what the stem/leaves taste like.

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Looking at this, instantly we can see how much smaller the pollen is compared to the previous sample. Here is a picture of them side by side under total magnification of 40x.

Quickly checking the pollen, they look very similar to the vegetable pollen sample. But just a much smaller version. Now when I think of pollen, I will not only think of allergies and hay fever, but polka dots!!!

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_{Note: Unless cited, all other images and gifs belong to @supersoju
References:
Brassica campestris var. oleifera}