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Honeybees do the most pollination out of any insect, but ants, beetles, butterflies and moths are also insects that can do pollination.

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Pollination: it’s vital to life on Earth, but largely unseen by the human eye. Filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg shows us the intricate world of pollen and pollinators with gorgeous high-speed images from his film “Wings of Life,” inspired by the vanishing of one of nature’s primary pollinators, the honeybee.

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Spend just a few minutes in a garden this time of year, and you will likely see a pollinator buzzing or fluttering from flower to flower. While most of us are aware of this vitally important ecosystem service, the act itself - the transfer of pollen from stamen to stigma via tiny feet, wings, antennas or mouthparts - is largely unseen.

In "Pollination Power," Heather Angel, a photographer based in Surrey, England, exposes the process in macrophotography, which stands out not only for its range and aesthetics, but also for its scientific exactness: She was determined to show not just creatures in flowers, but the instant release of pollen itself.

Ms. Angel's pursuits took her to 20 countries, from Kazakhstan to Costa Rica, though some of her most productive trips were closer to home: to her own backyard and to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in London.

The diversity of plants she captured is equaled only by the diversity of pollinators. " Bees get all the publicity, but there are so many other insects and animals that are important pollinators," she said. While her photographs include bees and butterflies galore, they also spotlight more unlikely players: hoverflies, scarab beetles, day geckos and blue tits.

Technical expertise made many of the images possible. Ms. Angel used an ultraviolet flash to expose the brilliant petal patterns and fluorescing nectar that many flowers produce for the benefit of their pollinators, normally invisible to the human eye. A red light allowed her to photograph nocturnal moth pollinators.

Plants are not passive players in pollination, and Ms. Angel paid special attention to their role in taking care of business.

Some flowers change color when pollination is complete, signaling to would-be visitors that they should move on to freshly opened blooms. Others open and close to control the timing of the act. All provide some form of enticement for pollinators: sugary nectar, pollen, a place to find a mate or even shelter from the elements.

"Sometimes you see up to five solitary male bees sleeping in a flower," Ms. Angel said.

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Watching Their Dust: Photographing Players in Pollination

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Spend just a few minutes in a garden this time of year, and you will likely see a pollinator buzzing or fluttering from flower to flower. While most of us are aware of this vitally important ecosystem service, the act itself - the transfer of pollen from stamen to stigma via tiny feet, wings, antennas or mouthparts - is largely unseen.

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Pollination is the act of transferring pollen grains from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma. The goal of every living organism, including plants, is to create offspring for the next generation. One of the ways that plants can produce offspring is by making seeds. Seeds contain the genetic information to produce a new plant.

Flowers are the tools that plants use to make their seeds. The basic parts of the flower are shown in the diagram below.

Seeds can only be produced when pollen is transferred between flowers of the same species. A species is defined a population of individuals capable of interbreeding freely with one another but because of geographic, reproductive, or other barriers, they do not interbreed with members of other species.

How does pollen get from one flower to another? Flowers must rely on vectors to move pollen. These vectors can include wind, water, birds, insects, butterflies, bats, and other animals that visit flowers. We call animals or insects that transfer pollen from plant to plant "pollinators".

Pollination is usually the unintended consequence of an animal's activity on a flower. The pollinator is often eating or collecting pollen for its protein and other nutritional characteristics or it is sipping nectar from the flower when pollen grains attach themselves to the animal's body. When the animal visits another flower for the same reason, pollen can fall off onto the flower's stigma and may result in successful reproduction of the flower.

Referring to the animated image, pollen from the anthers of Flower 1 is deposited on the stigma of Flower 2. 0nce on the stigma, pollen may "germinate," which means that a "pollen tube" forms on the sticky surface of the stigma and grows down into the ovule of the plant.

This growth can result in:

Successful fertilization of the flower and the growth of seeds and fruit; or,

A plant can be only partially fertilized, in which the fruit and/or seeds do not fully develop; or,

The plant can completely fail to be pollinated, and may not reproduce at all.

Plants can be:

Self-pollinating - the plant can fertilize itself; or,

Cross-pollinating - the plant needs a vector (a pollinator or the wind) to get the pollen to another flower of the same species.

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Home Celebrating Wildflowers Pollination is the act of transferring pollen grains from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma. The goal of every living organism, including plants, is to create offspring for the next generation. One of the ways that plants can produce offspring is by making seeds.