Spring flowers have co-evolved with insect pollinators for a long time. The flowers require pollen delivery to set seed. To ...

One answer is pollination, or plant sexual reproduction. Pollinators—typically wind, water, and animals—carry pollen from one flower to another, where fertilization takes place. Below ...

In other cases, flowers just pollinate themselves. But many species have evolved to get insects and other animals to do the work for them. The relationship between plants and their pollinators is an ...

Cross-pollination: The pollen grain lands on a different flower to the one it originated from. As plants cannot move like animals they must adopt a different method of transferring these pollen ...

Mutualistic interactions are mutually beneficial species interactions. Plant-pollinator mutualisms are particularly important, and involve nearly 170,000 plant and 200,000 animal species.

Buzz pollination—a process in which bees extract pollen by vibrating flowers—occurs in more than 20,000 plant species. Among the most specialized examples are the wildflowers of the ...