Place the pine cones somewhere where they can dry inside. Watch the pine cones over time. What happens? Note the changes! How long does it take them to reopen? Can you find pine cones from different types of pine trees? Do they open and close at the same rate?
Make a guess, set up your experience, then test your hypothesis, just like a scientist! When it is damp or cold outside, the pine cone scales close up. But how does the female pine cone know the weather? She responds to humidity , or in other words, the amount of water vapor floating around in the air. She can sense when rain and cold are coming and responds by closing. After the rain stops and as the sun dries up the environment, she reopens. Some types of pine cones have a part that is edible.
Edible means something can be eaten. There are about 20 different types of pine trees with cones big enough to harvest pine nuts from.
Humans can eat the nut, but not any other parts of the pine cone. You can see what harvested pine nuts look like in this photo. Pine nuts, also known as pignolia nuts, are most commonly used in baked goods such as cakes and cookies, but are also a tasty ingredient in salads and pesto sauce.
Pine nuts are one of the most expensive nuts in the world. The reason pine nuts are so expensive is because of the time required to grow the nuts and the effort it takes to harvest the seeds from their protective cone.
Pesto is a tasty bright green sauce that originated in Genoa, Italy. It tastes great on pasta and on crackers. Some people put on sandwiches or on the outside of cooked chicken or potatoes. It can even replace the red sauce on a pizza. Help feed the birds over the winter with this fun and easy pine cone bird feeder project that uses peanut butter and bird seed.
Use whatever supplies you have at home to paint, or glue craft materials to a pine cone to turn it into something cute and decorative. Foresters had to wear hard hats when working in areas where these trees grew to keep themselves from being knocked out cold by a falling pine cone. Look at how big these pine cones are! Dinosaurs ate pine cones!
Today, squirrels, woodpeckers, and crossbills birds like to eat pine cones, but about sixty million years ago, they were a favorite meal of Parasaurolophus.
Parasaurolophus dinos had teeth that were good for chewing tough pine cones. White pines cones are the official flower of the state of Maine. Precise timing of pine cone maturation and drop varies among them. Two to three years passes before a female pine cone matures, opens its scales, sheds its seeds and then falls to the ground, often from summer into fall.
Damaging winds or drought conditions can cause developing and mature pine cones to drop from the upper branches of pine trees. Each pine tree produces male cones and female cones. The male cones produce pollen, are typically very small and grow mostly on the lower branches. The female cones are larger and have woody spirals, which are designed to keep the seeds of the tree safe.
Male pine cones have a short life cycle, while the larger female cones have a longer one. Male cones produce pollen, which drifts into the air and fertilizes the female cones. Once fertilized, the woody spiral cases of the female cone can open and close to protect the seeds from being eaten by animals, from low temperatures, and from the wind.
Pine cones stay on a tree until the seeds are mature, which can be anywhere from 2 to 10 years. Typically, pine cones open and release their seeds and fall to the ground in warm weather, when there is a better chance for the seeds to germinate.
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