The nutmeg and mace are under the plant Myristica fragrans Houtt. belonging to the family of Myristicaceae. They are grown in the tropical places of West Indies and Indonesia. A certain science expert signified that the yearly generation of nutmeg summed up to around 19,040,000 pounds. Approximately one pound of mace is acquired for every ten pounds of nutmeg. This means that 2,240,000 pounds of the volume generated is mace.
The nutmeg tree has a resemblance with the apricot, and commonly, the trees have distance of approximately thirty feet apart. It grows a fruit having pale orange-yellow color, which is two-and-a-half inch in length that looks like an apricot. The minute details of the fruit can be magnified using the microscope such as stereo binocular microscope. Though, when the fruit has ripen, the half inch thick husk of the fruit separates into two pieces, uncovering the dark-colored nut, coated with a shining scarlet network or aril called as mace.
After harvesting the nuts, the aril is segregated from the nut and being sold as mace, and the nut itself being traded as nutmeg. The seeds should be sown in three days time subsequent to its harvest or the viability is gone. The minute details of the seeds can be enhanced under the microscope such as stereo binocular microscope. The plant will start to fruit on its fifth or sixth year, but is at its most excellent condition on its fifteenth year and stay at this fertile level in the next ten to twenty years. A single plant may generate at an average of one thousand eight hundred fruits yearly, producing twenty pounds nutmeg and two pounds mace.
The nutmeg plant has male flowers on one tree and female flowers on another tree making it dioecious. Sporadically, a nutmeg plant may have several flowers of the contrary sex, which means that a male tree may possibly have several female flowers. Infrequently also, the sexual characteristics of the plant may vary completely specifically it may vary from entire male or staminate flowers to absolutely female or pistillate flowers as monitored via microscopy using the stereo binocular microscope.
The flowers, which have light-yellow colors and bell-formed pendant, are in tiny cymes on a woody stalk, which is half an inch across. The male flowers that are approximately five to ten millimeters are extra globose as compared to the female flowers, and containing a mass of cylindrical stamens with approximately eight to ten millimeters in length and reaching up to the opening of the flower. As observed under the microscope such as stereo binocular microscope, the somewhat bigger female flowers are widened at the bottom having a small, two-lobed stigma and an ovary, which greatly fills the corolla. As examined via microscopy using a stereo binocular microscope, the nectar is generated in both kinds of flowers located at the bottom of the corolla. It needs six to nine months for the flower to develop into a ripe fruit. There may possibly be some three flowering rotations in the entire year.
The number of flowers of both sexes on any single tree is not sufficient making cross-pollination between trees a means of its procreation. The pollen should be transmitted to many pistillate flowers to set the one thousand five hundred to two thousand nuts being anticipated every year on a mature tree.
The nutmeg plant is pollinated by the insects, but as to what specific insects responsible to its pollination are not yet certain. Some of the observed insects being alleged to cause pollination are moths, small bees and small beetles. Other science experts also stated that pollination might have caused by the wind or some small insects. It is apparent that there is no enough knowledge as to what causes the pollination of the nutmeg plant, but rationally, its pollination is carried out by the insects.Read on this subject