Fig wasp

The fig is even more interesting than the date. Its life-story has become fully known only during the last century, thanks to the studies of American scientists and fruit growers when introducing the plant into the state of California.

The fig is a native of the Persian Gulf countries, and is cultivated all along the Mediterranean shore, as well as in India, Australia, and California. The tree grows from fifteen to thirty feet high.

It is a relative of the mulberry, the banyan tree, and the India rubber tree. When a ripe fig is gathered, a sticky milky substances adheres to the fingers, and this is not unlike the milky fluid of the rubber tree that hardens into rubber.

The Romantic and Mysterious Story of the Smyrna Fig

In form, it is constructed on the same principle as the Daisy, the Dandelion, and the sunflower. These have hundreds of tiny florets arranged around a center, radiating to form a disk.

However, in the fig blossom, the small flowers are drawn together to form a pear-shaped bag, with the flowers inside.

That is the fig, as we see it grow, and as in some places these flowers are never pollinated, the fruit never forms, and the flower-head remains a flower-head, although, if eaten when freshly gathered in the fall, it is delicious.

(It should be noted that the figs which grow in the Southern states do not form seeds and are not good dried).

Now, if you look closely, In the end opposite the stalk, which holds the fig to the tree is a little hole, and this is the door into the flower-head.

In the orchards of Turkey, the cultivators plant with the Smyrna fig, the Caprifig tree, which produces pollen, but not good fruit. There man cut off the staminate blossoms of the wild fig and hang them in trees of the cultivated variety, so that the cultivated blossoms may be pollinated and produce rich fruit.

Years ago, when the Smyrna fig trees were planted in California, the figs dropped off, so the growers sent to Turkey for knowledge of the cultivation practices there.

Soon they discovered the curious fact about the need of growing Caprifigs in the same orchards, and they did so -- with with very disappointing results.

One planter, however, took the pollen from a few Smyrna fig blossoms, and those figs matured and became sweet fruits. The next year he blew the Caprifig pollen into many Smyrna figs with a glass tube, and one hundred and fifty of them matured and ripened.

The scientists were now on the track of this success, and they found that the tiny insect referred to by ancient naturalist Pliny, was indeed a wasp, that visited both the Caprifig and the Smyrna fig blossoms, and as this insect evidently did the pollinating the mystery of ages was finally solved.

The solution of a mystery that puzzled men for centuries is this -- The Caprifig has three crops --- in spring, summer, and autumn. The autumn crop remains on the tree through the winter. The little fig-wasp spends the winter in the autumn Caprifigs, and then, having exhausted the food in them, emerges in the spring and goes into the spring Caprifigs to lay its eggs in them.

Then the wasp dies, but the eggs hatch out into new wasps, which live in the spring Caprifigs till they, too, exhaust the food supply, and come out in search of more. When they emerge, they are covered with pollen from the spring Caprifigs.

Deceived by the blossoms of the edible fig (the Symrna fig), the wasps enter them to find a nesting place. Finding their mistake, they come out again, but not before they have shaken off their pollen and fertilized the blossom.

They now fly about till the Summer Caprifigs are on the trees, and inside these they lay their eggs.

By autumn, the new wasps hatch out, leave the summer Caprifigs after exhausting the food supply, and enter the autumn Caprifigs, where they winter, and the whole story is repeated once more, year-after-year.