Flowers are the part of a plant that makes seeds. For most flowers to make seeds, pollen must travel from one flower to another. Bees, butterflies, wind, and other helpers carry pollen between flowers. This process is called pollination.
Observe real flowers and look for the dusty yellow pollen inside. Watch bees visiting flowers in a garden. Use cotton swabs to move pollen between flowers to simulate pollination. Watch a time-lapse video of flowers opening and bees arriving.
Have you ever looked closely at a flower? Besides the colorful petals, there is a lot going on inside. If you peek in, you might see some dusty yellow powder. That powder is called pollen, and it is one of the most important things in a flower. Pollen is needed to make seeds.
Here is how it works. A flower cannot make seeds all by itself. It needs pollen from another flower of the same kind. But flowers are stuck in the ground — they cannot walk over to each other. So they need helpers. The most famous helpers are bees. Flowers make a sweet liquid called nectar deep inside their petals. Bees love nectar and visit flowers to drink it. While a bee is crawling around inside a flower, pollen sticks to its fuzzy body. When the bee flies to the next flower, some of that pollen falls off inside the new flower. This transfer of pollen is called pollination.
Bees are not the only pollinators. Butterflies, hummingbirds, and even bats help move pollen. Wind can carry pollen too — that is how grasses and many trees get pollinated. Different flowers have different strategies: bright colors and sweet smells attract insects and birds, while wind-pollinated flowers are often plain because they do not need to attract visitors.
Once pollen reaches the right part of a new flower, seeds begin to form. The flower's petals usually fall off after pollination because their job (attracting pollinators) is done. What remains grows into a fruit with seeds inside. So every apple you eat, every strawberry, every tomato — it all started with pollination.