Garden Tool Set

Phalaenopsis - Hand Pollination

Some of you will have met our Phalaenopsis before, when I attempted a macro shoot of the plant, especially trying to show the flower from bud to bloom.

Well I recently realised how amazing these orchids are where it comes to pollination. So I decided to have a go at the process of hand pollination, not to get seed at the moment (so I used the same flower to retrieve and place the pollinia), but just to get experience.

The photo above shows the end of the column and the pollen sacs, pollinia. This is normally covered by an anther cap, which can be seen to the left on the photo above - I have removed it to reveal the pollinia. The column that holds the reproductive parts of the orchid, both the male and female parts, self-pollination is prevented by a film at the bottom of the anther cap.

Above is a close up of the pollinia, in its natural location at the end of the column and on our chopping board at home! The photo to the right shows the shape of the pollinia well.

Using a trusty drawing pencil I set to work. You can see the tip of the pencil pulling on the barb of the anther cap above which releases the pollinia. Normally the insect would be brushing back and forth on this, which would dislodge the anther cap.

Having removed the anther cap, we can see that the package is sticky enough to sit happily on the pencil tip - this also shows how small it all is. The white arrow shaped part stuck to the pencil is called the viscidium.

The final part of the process is to place the pollinia through the throat (the yellow part with reddish spots) and up into the stigma cavity. This took a couple of attempts, but the pollinia duly attatched and this should initiate the fertilisation process. If fertilisation is successful then the column will become enlarged and it's possible that the other flowers will terminate so that as much energy as possible is available to the creation of the seeds.

Here's an excellent macro shoot of a Phalaenopsis that uses equipment I can only dream of being able to afford:
http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artnov07/bj-orchid.html

And finally; a video of the process that I found on YouTube: