The Fairy-Land of Science eBook

The Bird’s-foot trefoil, Fig. 62, you will find almost anywhere all through the summer, and you will know it from other flowers very like it by its leaf, which is not a true trefoil, for behind the three usual leaflets of the clover and the shamrock leaf, it has two small leaflets near the stalk.  The flower, you will notice, is shaped very like the flower of a pea, and indeed it belongs to the same family, called the Papilionaceae or butterfly family, because the flowers look something like an insect flying.

In all these flowers the top petal stands up like a flag to catch the eye of the insect, and for this reason botanists call it the “standard”.  Below it are two side-petals called the “wings,” and if you pick these off you will find that the remaining two petals are joined together at the tip in a shape like the keel of a boat.  For this reason they are called the “keel”.  Notice as we pass that these two last petals have in them a curious little hollow or depression, and if you look inside the “wings” you will notice a little knob that fits into this hollow, and so locks the two together.  We shall see by-and-by that this is important.

Week 30

Next let us look at the half-flower when it is cut open, and see what there is inside.  There are ten stamens in all, enclosed with the stigma in the keel; nine are joined together and one is by itself.  The anthers of five of these stamens burst open while the flower is still a bud, but the other stamens go on growing, and push the pollen-dust, which is very moist and sticky, right up into the tip of the keel.  Here you see it lies right round the stigma, but as we saw before in the geranium, the stigma is not ripe and sticky yet, and so it does not use the pollen grains.

Now suppose that a bee comes to the flower.  The honey she has to fetch lies inside the tube, and the one stamen being loose she is able to get her proboscis in. but if she is to be of any use to the flower she must uncover the pollen-dust.  See how cunningly the flower has contrived this.  In order to put her head into the tube the bee must stand upon the wings, and her weight bends them down. but they are locked to the keel by the knob fitting in the hole, and so the keel is pushed down too, and the sticky pollen-dust is uncovered and comes right against the stomach of the bee and sticks there!  As soon as she has done feeding and flies away, up go the wings and the keel with them, covering up any pollen that remains ready for next time.  Then when the bee goes to another flower, as she touches the stigma as well as the pollen, she leaves some of the foreign dust upon it, and the flower uses that rather than its own, because it is better for its seeds.  If however no bee happens to come to one of these flowers, after a time the stigma becomes sticky and it uses its own pollen:  and this is perhaps one reason why the bird’s-foot trefoil is so very common, because it can do its own work if the bee does not help it.