Emily Kwong

It's like the parentage detective of the aughts.

Don't worry about it.

Okay, back to apples.

Let's talk about Apple Willie Wonka land.

Susan Brown and her team at Cornell Agrotech are inventing brand new varieties of apples all themselves.

How are they doing that?

So in order for Susan to create this brand new apple, this cross between these two different apple trees, she has to be able to choose the parents.

And that means she has to beat the bees.

You probably know what the petals look like already, but the anthers are the little almost antenna-looking things in the middle of the flower.

They're tipped by pollen.

So she takes those off.

That's intense.

Susan's emasculating these trees so the tree is not, like, appealing to the bee.

Yes.

So that apple tree is what they call the seed parent.

And then they pick the other apple they're going to cross it with, which is called the pollen parent.

So they collect that pollen in little plastic vials about the size of like a film canister.

Susan actually showed me some.

It basically looked like maybe a teaspoon, maybe two of this really, really fine yellow powder.

Wow.