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Nepenthes pollination techniques

I’ve got a general idea but have a few questions for those of you that have more practical experience than me with pollinating your Neps.

1.  At what point of the female flower opening do you start to apply pollen?  As soon as the sepals start to open and the tip of the carpel is exposed?  Or... once the sepals are fully folded back?

2. Do you apply the pollen only to the tip of the carpel?  Or… along its length?

3.  What time-frame do you feel there is for pollinating?

4.  Small paint brush or male flower directly for transferring pollen?

Right now I have started pollinating my N. ventricosa with N. mirabilis pollen (all I have available right now).  The sepals have opened enough to expose the tip of the carpel and I am applying the pollen with a small paint brush.

Interested to here what others do...

Aaron.
 
Aaron, it's a mixture of science and art. In relation to your specific queries:

1. Apply the pollen as soon as the female flower opens. As the flowers open over a number of days or longer, you will need fresh pollen to apply as the flowers open sequentially.

2. Only apply the pollen to the tip of the stigma, the rest of the structure (such as the ovary) is not receptive.

3. The stigma can stay receptive for a couple of days to over a week. You can generally tell by the appearance of the stigma whether it's still receptive.

4. This is more a matter of choice. I tend to cut the anther off and dab pollen directly on the stigma, but it can be a bit awkward. A brush gives you a bit more control of the process, but may waste a bit of pollen (which generally is not that material.

I also put a wax coated paper bag over the female scape after pollination to keep the humidity up, so the pollen doesn't dry out (which may not be an issue in a greenhouse where the humidity is sufficiently high).

And a word of advice to any who wants to send pollen in the mail. Tap the pollen into foil or wax paper envelopes prior to sending. Don't send the whole anther - the anther will ooze sap and render the pollen into a goey, unusable mass.
 
Michelle does the Nep pollinations. Her fingers are smaller and steadier. She removes the male flower from the spike and rubs the pollen onto the stigma surface as soon as the flower is fully opened. This is done a flower at a time. One male flower is good for several females. Often, the process is repeated again the next day, re-pollinating the same female flowers with a fresh male flower.
We recently pollinated our female thorelii (she's a beauty, too!) with stored pollen. It had been frozen for a month, and seems to have worked because we're getting nice fat pods. It will be interesting to see if they germinate.

Trent
 
Heck, I just used a q-tip. I think it worked, as it looks like the ovarie is swelling. I guess time will tell!
 
I shake the pollen spike over a sheet of foil or waxed paper and then rub the entire female spike in the pile of pollen. I've also used a paintbrush but thats tedious.
 
Looking good so far:

VentFlowers.jpg


I finished pollinating the top flower a few weeks ago. She is crossed with N. gracilis green (not a successful pollination I think) and N. albomarginata x veitchii. You can see the few buds sticking out from behind the plastic collar are not as large as the rest. This, I believe, is due to the gracilis pollen not being viable.

Bottom flower just opened this week. 1st 1/3 is N. vent squat, 2nd 1/3 is N. khasiana, last 1/3 will be N. alata striped in the next few day I hope.

2x more female and 1x male Vents still on the way of various forms.

Aaron.
 
Thanks for bringing the post back to the top Aaron. i was planning a similar one but now i dont have too. im starting to pollenate a few flowers on my veitchii tomorrow.

Rattler
 
Interesting to hear how other people do it. I'm much lazier, if the plants are in pots that can be moved I simply place them so that the flowers touch and leave the work to the ants
smile.gif
 
Rob,

I have loads of ants in the glasshouse but very few made it up to the flower spike. The pitchers seem to be their buffets of choice.

I should add that I used two methods for pollination.

Where I had the male flower I just cur of the males flowers one at a time and dabbed them against the female. In most cased one male would do 6-10 females. I repeated this every second day for 6 days.

Where collected pollen was sent to me I used a q-tip (cotton bud). Dabbed it into the satchel with the pollen and then against the female.

The plastic collars you see I am using so that I can ID what section of the flower has been pollinated by what male. For example on the larger flower under the collar is N. gracilis. Above the collar is N. albo x veitchii.

I did try a 3rd pollen on this flower (N. vent) and have identified those flowers by removing the sepals. Not the most accurate of ways and those seedpods do not seem to be developing at quite the rate of the ones pollinated with N. albo x veitchii.

The photo was taken a few days ago and the smaller flower is now separated into 3 sections by 2x collars (N. vent, N. khasiana, N. alata).

Aaron.
 
  • #10
Aaron,

The plastic collars look like a good idea. Better then twine as it might help inhibit insects from moving the pollen around.
 
  • #11
Rob ... dear, dear, dear. Using ants as pollinators... how do you stop cross pollination??
 
  • #12
smile.gif
Yes, Hamish, it is a little lazy, I must admit. I only do it with relatively common species where we require only a single seed capsule for tissue culture purposed. For example, we matched up 2 N. ventricosa last week. There are nearly 200 N. ventricosa flowers at the moment in highland nursery No. 5 and I don't want a bucket load of seed, so just picked 2 likely candidates.

Preventing cross pollination is easy. Boys are kept in one nursery, (insect poroofed) girls are in another nursery hundreds of meters away and the lovers are put into a nursery by themselves if I'm going to let ants do the job.

Actually, to tell the truth I rarely use the ant technique but it does work. Last time they effectively pollinated pretty much the whole spike. Usually if it's an important cross I do it as painstakingly as everyone else and then put a stocking over it.
 
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