Figs

I am blushing... No post yesterday. I am sorry, it was just a busy day in which it was hard to sit down in front of the computer even for the 20-30 minutes I need to write and post a blog. I promised to write about figs the other day. The fig tree is one of my favorites because I LOVE figs (raw, on pizza or in burnt fig jam), we have one fig tree in the garden here and my parents have one in their garden in Romania, and finally, although the fruit is easily visible, but the flower is hidden. I love the mystery associated with this tree. The fig is an angiosperm or flowering plant, but the fruit is the actual flower, i.e., flowers line the inside of the fruit, which is called an enclosed inflorescence. Even more interesting is the pollination, which is performed by a small wasp that burrows into the flower. I have never seen any wasps buzzing around our fig tree and I don't know how the wasp followed this type of tree around the world, as it was brought from continent to continent due to its high productivity and delicious fruit taste. The secret to this elusive wasp is that the life cycle of the fig wasp is closely entangled with that of the fig tree it inhabits. In the beginning of the life cycle, a mature female pollinator wasp enters the "fruit" through a small (visible) opening, which is covered in “male flowers”, and deposits her eggs inside the cavity, which is covered in “female flowers.” The wasp often loses her wings and most of her antennae while squeezing in, but she deposits her egg and the pollen she picked up from her original host fig. This pollinates some of the female flowers on the inside surface of the fig and allows them to mature. Then the female wasp lays her eggs and dies, her body decomposing inside the fig. The fig matures and the wasp eggs hatch and grow into adults, which mate inside the fig. After this, a male wasp digs a tunnel out of the fig, for the females to escape through. The males then die, but the females, covered in pollen, find their way out and fly to another tree of the same species where they deposit their eggs and allow the cycle to start over again.