I30 Plants and their Ways in Soitth Africa 



Try the same experiment in your garden, but be careful, 

 before the buds are open and until after the seeds " set," to 

 keep the flowers covered with gauze to keep out insects, or else 

 they will come and manage affairs their own way. 



Note. — To know what orchids mean by masquerading as they do, 

 Darwin's book on "The FertiHzation of Orchids" should be read. The 

 beautifully illustrated books of Dr. Bolus on South African orchids will 

 help you to understand the flowers. 



Orchids have gone to such an expense in making their 

 perianth attractive to insects, and in filling their long cornu- 

 copias with honey, that they make up arrears 

 by economizing in pollen. 



However nicely flowers are adapted for 

 scattering their pollen as dust, some of it is 

 sure to be wasted. The pollen of the orchid 

 is bound up in neat parcels (Pollinia), each 

 provided with a gummed label attached to 

 an elastic cord, or the two parcels may be 

 attached to one label At meal times butter- 

 flies or moths collect these parcels, which 

 become firmly gummed on to some part of 

 their bodies, and as they go from flower to 

 flower they deliver directly to the stigmas 

 some of the quickening grains. You can 

 see how it is done by applying a pencil point 

 to the two white labels at the entrance of 

 a Satyrium or a Disa flower. 



The moth or butterfly sometimes gets so many of these 

 parcels on to various parts of its body as to seriously incon- 

 venience it. Sometimes their tongues become so covered that 

 they starve to death. Professor Gray illustrates a moth flying 

 with a pollen mass on each eye. Fortunately each eye is made 

 up of hundreds of smaller ones, so the moth has enough left to 

 guide him to another flower. 



Microloma, Secamone (Bavian's touw), Asclepias (the milk 

 bush), which is so plentiful on the Karroo, and all their 

 family have their pollen in masses also. One of this, family 



Fig. 144. — Pollinia of 

 an Orchid, with their 

 pedicels united by 

 therostellum. (From 

 Thome and Ben- 

 nett's " Structural 

 and Physiological 

 Botany.") 



