Tuesday, November 20, 2012

butterfly/banana

Hello there.  We went for a walk to the pool area and the rec hall this morning.  I found this guy on a railing waiting for me to take his pic. 
I like the way his wings are folded.  He never did put them flat like most butterflies do. 
This is a banana plant that is in front of the meeting hall at the resort.  Last year when we were here the bananas were yellow. 
The banana plant is the largest herbaceous flowering plant. The plants are normally tall and fairly sturdy and are often mistaken for treed, but their main or upright stem is actually a pseudo stem that grows 20 to 24.9 ft tall, growing from a corm. Each pseudo stem can produce a single bunch of bananas. After fruiting, the pseudo stem dies, but offshoots may develop from the base of the plant. Many varieties of bananas are perennial.
Leaves are spirally arranged and may grow 8.9 ft long and 2.0 ft wide. They are easily torn by the wind, resulting in the familiar frond look.
This is the very beginning of the flower
Here the flower has produced some green bananas and is still working on more.
You can see the flower better in this pic interesting. 


Each pseudo stem normally produces a single inflorescence also known as the banana heart. (More are sometimes produced; an exceptional plant in the Philippines produced five.) The inflorescence contains many bracts (sometimes incorrectly called petals) between rows of flowers. The female flowers (which can develop into fruit) appear in rows further up the stem (closer to the leaves) from the rows of male flowers. The ovary is inferior, meaning that the tiny petals and other flower parts appear at the tip of the ovary.
The banana fruits develop from the banana heart, in a large hanging cluster, made up of tiers (called hands), with up to 20 fruit to a tier. The hanging cluster is known as a bunch, comprising 3–20 tiers, or commercially as a "banana stem", and can weigh from 30–50 kilograms (66–110 lb).
Individual banana fruits (commonly known as a banana or 'finger') average 0.28 lb, of which approximately 75% is water and 25% dry matter. There is a protective outer layer (a peel or skin) with numerous long, thin strings (the phloem bundles ), which run lengthwise between the skin and the edible inner portion. The inner part of the common yellow dessert variety splits easily lengthwise into three sections that correspond to the inner portions of the three  carpels
The fruit has been described as a "leathery berry" In cultivated varieties, the seeds are diminished nearly to non-existence; their remnants are tiny black specks in the interior of the fruit.


Very Interesting Information 
Maybe this is why someone I know hates this fruit.



 Bananas are naturally slightly radioactive, more so than most other fruits, because of their potassium content and the small amounts of the isotope potassium-40 found in naturally occurring potassium.  Proponents of nuclear power sometimes refer to the  banana equivalent does of radiation to support their arguments.







You now have a place to send those one of a kind socks that you find in the dryer. LOL

No comments:

Post a Comment