In this activity, students play a tag-like game to learn the process of how plants become pollinated.
Pollination occurs when insects and other pollinators feed on nectar from flowers. There are roughly 200,000 varieties of living pollinators in the wild, most of which are insects. Other animals such as birds, small mammals, and bats can also help with pollination.
As pollinators reach for the nectar in flowers, they rub against the pollen and it often sticks to them. As they move between flowers, the pollinator brushes off onto other flowers. This is a strategy plants use for pollen to travel and fertilization to occur, since plants are rooted in place.
Pollination plays an important role in our everyday lives. It has a particularly great effect on the variety of food that we have available to us—apples, berries, chocolate and peanut butter are all by-products of the work that pollinators do. In fact, over 80% of the living flowering plants rely on pollinators for their survival.
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