By Ming Zhou

If you are allergic to pollen, you’ll find these pollen pictures intriguing.

After four long months of the miserable winter, spring is finally here. While we don’t have to deal with the dreadful cold anymore, we have a spring problem to deal with – pollen! Before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, I’d never seen so much pollen. I mean, whenever the wind blows, you see clouds of yellow dust raining down from the sky. To show you that I’m not exaggerating, one day I walked out of the house and I saw this:

Being an analytical microscopist, I was curious what pine pollen would look like on a microscopic scale. So I collected some pollen samples and brought them back to the lab. Below is a series of pictures taken with an optical microscope and a scanning electron microscope.

Picture taken with a single lens digital camera showing a branch tip from a pine tree.

The orange materials are the catkins that encapsulate the pollen.

Picture taken with a stereo microscope; all the yellow specks are individual pollen particles that fell out of the catkin.

Zooming in, you can see the pollen particles sitting inside the catkins.

This is an image of pollen particles taken with a polarized light microscope at 400X. It shows the internal structure of the pollen, and each particle is about 50 micrometers.

This is one of the pods from the catkin. This scanning electron microscope image shows pollen particles lying in the pod.

Here is another scanning electron microscope image of the pod. Can you imagine how many pollen particles are in just one pod? I’d say probably several hundreds to thousands of particles. Now imagine how many pollen particles are in one catkin. Or in one pine tree. No wonder we have allergy problems!!!

This is a higher magnification of an individual pollen particle. What do you think it looks like? Would you say Mickey Mouse ears? Or winter ear muffs?

With some help from my colleague, we made a 3D image of the pollen particles. So put on your 3D glasses (magenta/cyan) and enjoy!

Here is a wobble image for those who don’t own a pair of 3D glasses.

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