nybg:

As if bumblebees weren’t already cool enough, this just in: they’re using electric fields to judge whether or not a flower has already been plundered of its pollen by another pollinator. This article from Scientific American says that the bees “build up a positive electrical charge as they rapidly flap their wings.” This is useful to the bees and the flowers as it helps the pollen more tightly cling to the bees. But it also turns out that it minutely changes the electrical field of flowers which have already been visited by another bee, and the bees can see this. As I have said so many times before, and will probably say a thousand times again, nature is so totally cool! ~AR

(via Bumblebees Sense Electric Fields in Flowers: Scientific American)

The anther is the male reproductive portion of the flower, and holds the pollen. Pollen grains consist of a hard shell protecting one reproductive cell with two nuclei, and some number of non-reproductive cells (it varies depending on species). This pollen grain, hopefully, makes its way to the pistil of a flower of the same species and fertilizes the egg.

Photo by ~abysal on DeviantArt

frontal-cortex:

Forget-me-not anther with pollen by Martin Oeggerli

Pollen as seen under a scanning electron microscope.

Source.

Palynology is the study of pollen, or, more specifically, “the study of microscopic objects of macromolecular organic composition (i.e. compounds of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen), not capable of dissolution in hydrochloric or hydrofluoric acids.” This includes pollen and spores, among other things.
Pollen is extremely resilient, and scientists can extract ancient pollen from compacted earth or lake beds, and analyze the composition, to see what plants existed during a certain time period.

 Source: W.A.S. Sarjeant, 2002. ‘As chimney-sweeps, come to dust’: a history of palynology to 1970.