Biography of Medunitsa

En Medunitsa If adults love windmills, sleep-trawl and other beautifully flowering primroses, then children, without a doubt, love Medunitsa more. And how not to love her when you can tear its flower and feel in your mouth with nothing incomparable sweetness? And although the flowers of Medunitsa are not sweets, they are especially pleasant when they are torn in the spring forest under bird trills, ringing streams, among the spring aroma.

And so there will be a memory of Medunitsa for life, as one of the amazing pleasures of the child. Medunitsa belongs to the Burachniki family, her closest relatives are forget -me -nots, a bruise, cucumber grass and remarkably reminiscent of it, but poisonous - Nonea of ​​Chernobory. Like most of her brothers, the stem and leaves of the Medunitsa are covered with rough hairs.

While it blooms and bears fruit, the NOO preserves a ground stem with a few sitting widely lanceolate leaves, turning into a creeping branched rhizome. After fruiting, it fades, and basal leaves appear from the rhizome, the shape of which in different species is unequal. Medunitsa appears in our forests almost simultaneously with armhole, crests, goose bows.

Before the snow had time to go out, its short stalks with beautiful noticeable flowers appear, first dark pink, then cornflower-blue. According to one legends, the blue flowers of Medunitsa are Adam flowers, and pink - Eve. Thus, Medunitsa acts as a plant symbolizing the unity of opposites. The color of the jellyfish petals is associated with the reaction of the dyeing pigment of anthocyan in the cell juice to the size of the hydrogen pH, which reflects the acidity of the medium: with an acidic reaction of the cell juice, Anthocyan gives to the petals the shades of red color, with alkaline - blue.

Finding out why such a change of colors specifically in Medunitsa resembles a detective story. It began with how the German botanist G. Müller at the end of the 19th century was the first to ask himself the question: why is it Medunitsa? Observing the plant, he noticed that insects - bees from the Antofora genus - are more often visited by pink flowers, and blue less often.

And he made a logical conclusion-there are fewer nectar in the blue and blue flowers, and the color of the petals, as it were, warns the insects, so that they do not work to look for nectar in them. Müller immediately wrote a note about this in the popular science magazine "Cosmos". The note was read and rewritten to the textbooks. And so far some botanists-conservatives believe that it is so.

But so? Forty years have passed when Botaniki finally became interested in the question, and how many Nectar the Medunitsa is distinguished. And they found out - the nectar is equally well distinguished by both pink and blue. It turned out that the shades of flowers do not speak about anything insects. However, the bumblebees clearly gave preferences to pink colors, and not blue.

It was assumed that the bumblebee is a heavy insect, it is simply inconvenient for him to be located on blue flowers during the collection of nectar, since their corolla is weaker, the bumblebee of that and look - there is nothing to hold on to. Another thirty years have passed. Our botanist A. He was distinguished by a great observation for Medunitsa. Kozhevnikov found that sometimes insects are more interpreted in blue flowers.

Twenty years more have passed. For Medunitsa, in this case, the Medunitsa is the softest, Perm botanists took up. They decided to finish what A. Kozhevnikov did not do - to observe the behavior of the flowering Medunitsa of different insects. And here's what they found out. Bumblebees sat on all sorts of flowers, including blue. The instability of the widescents of the blue flowers of bumblebees did not bother.

The bees also visited both flowers. Only the bees from the Antofora clan, with which Miller began their observations, really visited blue flowers three times less often than pink. Observers of the Medunitsa did not take into account that not only nectar is interested in different insects in flowers. One nectar in the flowers of Medunitsa collect only bumblebees. Bees are looking for nectar and pollen in them.

Everything except antofor. Antofora collects only pollen. And pollen in old flowers is much smaller than in pink.

Thus, the issue of pollination of Medunitsa was studied and discussed for almost a hundred years. This is an example of how to be attentive when studying simple tasks that nature sets us, how easy it is to make a mistake, draw hasty and wrong conclusions and how much work is required to solve its riddles. The Medunitsa flower has a fairly simple structure. A cup and a corolla with five cups and petals, the cups, as well as the petals, have grown together, because the flower corolla with a long tube and an open yawn, in which five bundles of hairs are noticeable.

There are five stamens too. At the bottom of the ovary of the pestle, you can see a dense ring. This is a nectar. As already mentioned, the Medunitsa is pollinated primarily by bees that can reach the nectar, accumulating on the bottom of the flower with their long proboscis. Medunitsa flowers have another interesting feature associated with the need for compulsory cross -pollination, the so -called dimorphic heterostilia from the Greek.It means the development of flowers of different plants of plants that differ in the length of the columns and stamens, due to which stigmas and anthers are located at different heights, and in some plants columns are shorter than stamens, in others, stamens are shorter than columns.

The essence of this device is that the insect, touching the anthers in a flower of the same type, stains its body with pollen in those places that correspond to the stigmas of the column in a flower of a different type. Medunitsa flowers at the top of the stem are collected in the inflorescence - a curl, also characteristic of the drilling tanks. Usually on her stem there are two such curls, slightly reminiscent of lamb horns.

The fruit of Medunitsa also has its own characteristics. It consists of 4 small nuts that quickly break up during ripening. The scientific generic name of the Pulmonaria Medunitsa comes from the Latin Pulmo - “light” Pulmonalis - “pulmonary”. It is associated with the use of plants of this genus for the treatment of pulmonary diseases. The Russian name of the genus, used in scientific and popular science literature-Medunits-coincides with the traditional Russian name of the genus and is associated with honey-making properties.

Medunitsa is one of the first honey plants of our flora. Sometimes there are other Russian names: “Little linen” and “Little grass”, “Medunika”, “Medical”. There are funny names. So in some places, the Medunitsa is called the “voluntary tongue” for the shape of her basal leaves. Probably the most popular fairy tale in which the Medunitsa appears is "The adventure of Dunno and his friends." How not to love Dr.

Medunitsa, who treated the shorties with a honey patch and honey, which is incomparably pleasant to Kastorki and iodine, which was used by Dr. Pilyulkin? In the Yangan-Tau geopark, as in the whole Republic of Bashkortostan, there are two types of Medunits-Medunitsa unclear and Medunitsa is fussy. They differ well in the form of basal leaves. In Medunitsa, they are obscure in shape on long narrow-winged petioles, in Medunitsa, the brown leaves are elongated-elliptical, gradually narrowed into the winged petiole.

And before their appearance, Medunitsa can be distinguished by the color of the flowers, which Medunitsa at first is pink-red, and then dirty blue, while the Medunitsa with a fussy corolla is first red, and then bright blue. Both species can meet in deciduous and mixed forests and through their edges. During mass flowering, with a thick growth of Medunitsa, the pulp under the canopy of the forest scatters the amazing beauty of the bright blue carpet of colors.

The author is Pozdnyakova Emma Petrovna.