The pollination biology to study biological structure of natural populations

We studied the pollination biology of some species of Faboideae, with special attention to the pollination mechanisms. We calculated the pollen/ovule ratio (P/O) to obtain indirect information about breeding system and efficiency of pollen transfer. We calculated correlation between quantitative characters: P(total number of pollen grains per flower), O (total number of ovule per flower), P/O (Pollen/Ovule ratio), V (volume of single pollen grain), Vtot (total volume of pollen per flower) and flower dry weight (size of flower), to assess the energy investment in reproduction. All species resulted xenogamus. The pollination mechanism didn't result correlated either with taxonomic position of species, or with P/O ratio.There is no trade-off between number and volume of pollen grains, while a positive correlation has been verified between: P and O; flower size and volume of single pollen grain and flower size and total volume of pollen.