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Image of the day – 167
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Orchids produce such beautiful flowers, often in great abundance, and they last for months if protected from too much heat and strong sun. This lovely, white Phalaenopsis flowers every year for us, but this year it had a bad plague of scale insect on the backs of the petals and on the leaves.
Scale insects are not hard to deal with as they can be wiped off with a soft tissue moistened with methylated spirit. Or even just wiped away gently with your finger. But you have to be persistent because you need to remove all the adults and then keep on removing the smaller insects until you have broken their reproductive cycle.
Orchids grow wild here in the UK, they’re not as showy as many of the tropical ones, and the flowers are far smaller, but they are still beautiful plants. Some orchids have flowers that mimic insects such as bees, butterflies, and flies. The insects are attracted to the flowers, and sometimes even attempt to mate with them; they act as pollinators, spreading the orchid pollen from one flower to another and so helping the orchid produce viable seed.
See also:
- Orchid – Wikipedia
- Wild orchid photo gallery – First Nature
- Wild orchids back from the brink – Kew Gardens, Grow Wild
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