Pollination
4 Minutes
Pollination for kids: learn how pollen travels to form fruit, natural and artificial pollination, and how bees help. An English science lesson.
- How flowers turn into fruit through pollination and fertilization
- Artificial pollination by humans and natural pollination by bees
- Self-pollination in bisexual flowers and cross-pollination
What this lesson teaches
Pollination is the process where pollen grains from the male reproductive part of a flower reach and stick to the stigma of the female reproductive part. This step, followed by fertilization, allows a flower to develop into a fruit.
Two main ways pollination occurs
Pollination takes place either through human intervention or naturally on its own. When humans take the pollen dust from a male flower and place it directly on the stigma of a female flower, that process is called artificial pollination. When the transfer happens without human intervention, it is called natural pollination. A flower where pollination successfully happens is known as a pollinated flower, while a flower where it does not happen is called an unpollinated flower.
How natural pollinators work
- Pollinators are living helpers like bees, insects, and birds that cause natural pollination to happen.
- The bee is the most important of all these pollinators, and it is attracted to a flower by the corolla.
- When a bee visits a male flower to drink its nectar, pollen grains stick onto the bee.
- When that bee flies to a nearby female flower to drink more nectar, those pollen grains stick to the stigma of the female flower.
Self-pollination in bisexual flowers
Self-pollination is a type of natural pollination that happens inside bisexual flowers. Bisexual flowers are flowers that have both a male reproductive part and a female reproductive part together. In these flowers, pollen grains from the male part attach directly to the female reproductive part of the exact same flower. Because the pollen does not need to travel to a separate flower, these plants have fewer pollen grains.
Cross-pollination in unisexual flowers
- Unisexual flowers have separate male flowers and separate female flowers.
- Cross-pollination occurs when pollination happens between two different flowers.
- These flowers rely on external pollinators like bees and insects to carry pollen across the distance.
- Unisexual flowers produce a large number of pollen grains to help this transfer take place.
- After pollination is complete, the flower goes through fertilization to turn into a fruit.