hello YouTube welcome back to my channel in today's video I am going to be working with them helium for us third type of carnivorous plant and we are going to try to pollinate a flower so it is a little bit of a difficult technique more so than some other plants and you can see before you all my helium for us and if I turn this way we will get the flower in focus here so that is a helium for a flower it's been open for 1 day now it was fully open like this yesterday and so today is sort of the second day it's open now in order to know how to pollinate a heliamphora you have to know a few things about these guys first so they are sequential bloomers so this is the first one on the despite here's a spike there's this a little sheath that the flower came out of and you can already see the next bud there as well so when this flower first opens it is receptive to pollen for a few days and the pollen goes on the stigma of the plant now I don't have a whole lot of flower knowledge so stigma and antlers are my about as far as my expertise go so the pollen goes on the stigma just like any other flower except for there is no pollen available until after the stigma is no longer receptive which means the first flower on the heliamphora cannot be pollinated by its own pollen after this one is no longer receptive it's going to let loose its pollen and then the next one can be pollinated by that pollen is a little bit tricky to get out of these guys so we're going to do this video in a few stages so first off let's just have a look at the flower and you guys are gonna kill me for this but I'm going to do this for the name of science just so you guys can see in here a little bit better it makes it much easier to work to so I took off the little sheets there now you can see a little bit more the flower let's see how easy it is these flowers sometimes they orientate nice and they're easy to work with other times they're not so we're gonna bend this up we have to expose the little bits there that we're looking for they are very far up in all right so there is a good view here you can see the stigma is right down there and the anther is up there that's where the pollen is going to be so we need to get pollen on this little piece right here and what I'm going to do is just remove this petal altogether and I am likely going to remove this petal as well because it's going to make filming and doing this work much much easier so we're going to leave it like this and let's get a good view of the flower now that we can see all the parts there we go so we can see what we're working with there and what we have to do next is get some pollen so I can't get it from this flower because it hasn't produced pollen yet these things will go kind of a yellowy color when you can so let me adjust the camera we're gonna have to go to a different flower and we're gonna have to get some pollen okay it took some real maneuvering to get this guy in focus because it's just so bright in here I hung a towel behind of the plant and so we just have the anthers and the stigma left all the petals have been removed so you can see this easily and if you look really close add to the stigma I'm not sure if we're gonna be able to see it but has actually got a black dot on the end it's not white anymore which means this one is hopefully pollinated unpoetic stigmas are still the same color as the actual stigma itself that sort of creamy tan color alright and then what this isn't perfect focus if I can we need two tools for this one is a glass jar to catch the pollen just like cell mine's a little bit overkill the other is a tuning fork because in the wild these guys get pollinated by insects like bees and it's actually the pollen is inside these little sacs here in order to release it you need to get a frequency of the bees wings sort of meeting next to it or on it and it's going to release the pollen so what I'm going to do is tap my tuning fork put this underneath and touch it to it and hopefully you will get a shot and you'll be able to see the pollen these plants have a very very tiny amount of pollen but this will still give you an idea of what it's going to look like even if you can't see the pollen not sure if you're able to see that or not and so the tiniest little bits of pollen is falling out of this all the fans have been turned off in the greenhouse and I am just using the tuning fork to vibrate these little pollen sacs on the anthers and I can see a little bits of pollen falling out I'm not sure if you're going to be able to on camera or not it is a minut amount that was actually a lot there I'm not sure if that's gonna show up or not I sure hope so by a lot it was just a miniscule puff of white or yellow so that is how we em get the pollen out you know now bumped it this is very shaky work with the camera really zoomed in so that is all I'm going to do for there for now and that is how we retrieve poen now let's go back to the main flower okay back to the main flower so hopefully this is going to pollinate today if it doesn't I need to try again tomorrow and ideally you want to try twice a day every day until you see the stigma has gone black and then I even do it another day or so after that so I'm gonna try to point this out but so you can see the color of the stigma now it is the exact same color all the way along and down and what I'm going to do I have been collecting pollen for a while in here so you'll both to see pollen in the bottom of that jar I collect with every flower that opens I collect the pollen and so that's what I've got you can see even some marks from the paintbrush from other flower pollination so this is all helium for a minor pollen I'm just opening the jar off-camera I have got my paintbrush here for pollinating I actually took a razor blade and cut about half the bristles off of it and then I actually took it was white bristles then I took a jiffy marker and a permanent Jeffie marker and painted the blue the bristles black so I could see them in a perfect world just grab yourself a black paintbrush so we will dip it in see if we can get a shot of this you're more likely just gonna see the marks on the bottom of the jar sort of thing you're just gonna dip it touch a little bit just touching a little bit there now I can see it on the end of the paintbrush see just that little white mark there I'm not sure that's gonna focus but that's not too important so now all we are going to do is touch the end of the stigma with the paintbrush with the pollen on and hopefully we'll get that pollinated today and if it is successfully pollinated and if it is successfully pollinated the stigma will turn black so let's just give it a minute there I'm gonna put the lid back on the jar hopefully you've seen what I was doing I've got it so zoomed in I'm working within like one square inch of range here in order to get the shot so let's have a look now after the stigma and I can see that there is a slight bit of color starting on this stigma now maybe if we came back in ten minutes or so that would be totally pollinated I'm just gonna go for another dip in here of pollen get my brush really covered and do it one more time for good luck get in focus if I can there we go ever so delicately we just painting the end of the stigma there now I can see it already this has been a successful pollination the stigma has turned black but I don't know if you'll be able to really see it on camera but it has gone dark there you can see it more almost from the side view so anyways let's zoom you back out because as like Mack zoomed in and that is how we successfully pollinate a heliamphora flower so I hope you liked this video and if you want to see more videos like this make sure you subscribe to my channel as always thanks for watching