Pollen is the dust-like material shed by male flowers (or reversed female flowers). Each grain carries a haploid nucleus that, on landing on a stigma, grows a tube to an ovule and fertilises it, producing a seed. Cannabis pollen is wind-dispersed, light and produced in huge quantities.
In practice
One male can seed a whole room. Breeders isolate males, collect pollen on paper or in a bag over the flowers, and apply it to chosen branches with a brush. Collected pollen stays viable for days at room temperature; drying it and storing it cold or frozen extends that substantially (Gaudet et al. 2020). Germination tests tell you whether stored pollen is still worth using.
Outdoors, cannabis and hemp pollen can travel long distances on wind, which is why seed producers and flower growers near hemp fields worry about stray pollination.
Don't confuse with
- Trichome resin: the sticky, aromatic heads on female flowers. Pollen is dusty, yellowish and odourless by comparison.
- Pollen from a herm: genetically from the same female, it spreads sex instability.
- Nanners: slang for exposed male anthers on a female plant; the source of herm pollen, covered in the slang entry.
A male flower that carries stamens (anthers on filaments) and no functional pistil; in cannabis, five drooping sepals around five pollen-shedding anthers.Sex reversal is chemically inducing a genetically female cannabis plant to grow fertile male flowers, so its pollen can make feminised seed; silver thiosulfate is the standard agent.Germination is the stage where a viable seed absorbs water, splits its shell and pushes out a root (radicle), usually within 1-7 days at 20-30 °C.Hemp is cannabis grown for fibre, seed or other uses and, in many laws, defined as Cannabis sativa with no more than 0.3% THC by dry weight.A hair-like outgrowth of the plant's skin; in cannabis the glandular types make and store the resin holding cannabinoids and terpenes.A female flower with a pistil but no functional stamens; in cannabis, a bract-wrapped ovary topped by two stigmas.In cannabis growing, a plant (usually female) that develops both pistillate and staminate flowers or anthers; botanists call it intersex or monoecious expression.Nanners (bananas) are exposed, banana-shaped anthers on a female flower: a hermaphrodite trait, not a normal part of late flowering, and a reason to cull.Pollination is the transfer of pollen onto a female flower's stigmas; in cannabis it is usually by wind, or by hand when breeders pollinate chosen branches to make seed.Male selection is the choice of which male plants become parents, judged by their vigour, structure, early aroma and above all by the quality of their offspring.STS (silver thiosulfate) is a silver compound sprayed on female cannabis to block ethylene action and induce fertile male flowers, the standard method for making feminised seed.A cross is the offspring of mating two different plants, written female x male, as "A x B"; one cross starts a line but is not one.Regular seed comes from a normal cross of a female and a male, so it produces roughly half female and half male plants.
