
"In the Spring, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of...umm..."
Tell me again, what did you say that thing was?!
Well, it's an object of lust, of course! With a bit of anthropomorphism, and only if you happen to be maple pollen.

This is in fact the end of one style of a maple flower, shot very "up close and personal".
You can see a whole flower HERE.
What you're looking at in the image above is less than 1 mm of the very tip of one of those brush-like styles curving up from the flower.
Pretty bizarre structure, eh?
I'm intrigued by those alternating clear and red sections that we can see in the silhouetted fingers. (There must be a technical term for those things. Anybody know what it is?)
From this one picture, it looks like the red and clear might be some sort of immiscible fluids. But I tried watching at 200X whilst I squashed a style between two microscope slides, and it seemed that while there are red and clear fluids, they are completely miscible and are kept separated by some sort of membrane. I have no idea what the red is or what purpose it might serve.
Hope you find this interesting, and I will greatly appreciate any other info you can add!
--Rik
Technical Details: Canon 300D camera, Nikon CF N Plan Achro 10X NA 0.30 objective at 15.6X, 250 mm away from the sensor. Electronic flash, 83 frames in 0.030" (0.00036" average step). Subject size as shown, 0.95 mm square. Stacked with Zerene Stacker, PMax and DMap combined by retouching.
Edit: to mention Zerene Stacker, which had not gone public at the time this post was originally made.