I'm not a professional breeder, I let work the Bees
In the follow I will show, how variable the seedlings are across from the mother plant.
The mother plant is
Stockholm, SDB, 1972, Bee Warburton

The following seedlings are from two seed pods:
1 ..|.. 2 ..|.. 3

4 ..|.. 5 ..|.. 6

7 ..|.. 8 ..|.. 9

10 ..|.. 11 ..|.. 12

13 ..|.. 14 ..|.. 15

Little Shadow, SDB, 1953, Geddes Douglas


seedlings:
16 ..|.. 17 ..|.. 18

19 ..|.. 20 ..|.. 21

22 ..|.. 23 ..|.. 24

25

Red Heart, SDB, 1967, Alta Brown


seedlings: (3 seed pots)
26 ..|.. 27 ..|.. 28

29 ..|.. 30 ..|.. 31

32 ..|.. 33 ..|.. 34

35 ..|.. 36 ..|.. 37

38 ..|.. 39 ..|.. 40

41 ..|.. 42 ..|.. 43

44 ..|.. 45 ..|.. 46

47 ..|.. 48 ..|.. 49

50 ..|.. 51

Those are some gorgeous seedlings. Fun to see the differences even coming from the same parents.

they are gorgeous and interesting. Thank you for sharing!

I especially like seedling number 5 and 10 from the Little Shadow cross and number 8 and 9 from the Red Heart cross!

to the iris forum, nice to see your seedlings, they sure are variable aren't they.

Thank you very much for posting your seedlings. I am always interested in seeing the variation in seed pods. I am amazed at how greatly the resulting seedlings in a single pod can vary. They are proof of how powerfully the inherited genes of even distant parents can be.

That is so cool! Amazing and nice to see what your bees can bring out
gives me hope for some of my bee pods!

Edit to fix spelling.
Amazing! I never knew they would vary that much.

One or other iris is better as the parents plant. But unfortunately most are for the compost. sadly

Hybridizing requires an element of ruthlessness in choosing what to keep.

IrisP, thank you for sharing those wonderful pictures! I absolutely love seeing how the genetics play out, especially when there are a bunch of surprises. Those pictures demonstrate that irises have more than a single set of alleles responsible for color, and they don't always play predictably!

IrisP said:

I found that interesting as I haven't had enough of my seedlings bloom to see how much they vary. These 2 are my favourites.

lovemyhouse said:Hybridizing requires an element of ruthlessness in choosing what to keep.

tell this to my wife

I understand her completely!

I know you said that you were planning to compost all of the above flowers, but I just wanted to let you know that #3, 6, 25, 44, and 45 all looked like winners to me! Nearly all of the pictures were pretty, but the pictures for those particular irises made them look like keepers. Pictures can deceive though, I suppose.

Isn't it amazing work that bees do for nature? This represents a lot of time and effort on your part as well. I find these seedlings fascinating!

I especially like #'s 47, 35, 27(yellow with purple /red blush), 11 or 13 ( dark purple with the blue blaze/orange hafts) . I'd be happy to pay you for shipment or what would you like? if you plan to toss them.

Here's some of my first attempt to grow out bee pods. They took 2 years to flower. They are an unknown cross with I Pallida. I just don't have the heart to toss them.

Many thanks for your feedbacks.

It's realy so that I plan to keep for registration only 5 or 6 of the showed iris.

#4 - the best form
#18 - an unusually color combination
#25 - a radiant appearance
#32 - an unusually color combination
#36 - one of the best grower I have in the Brennet Iris Garden

It is one side, to look good on a photo, but to registrate an iris and bring it into the commerce, it must have more qualities:
- a good branching
- a good growing
- a balanced proportion of the flower to the height of the plant
- modern SDB's are have very flat petals
- I think it does not make sense to registrate an iris, when you can find in commerce 350 'yellow self' or 240 'white self' - and so on

One of my favorite SDB seedlings I have, got only one flower per stalk 'cry

Thanks for numbering them

#45 is my favorite

lovemyhouse said:Hybridizing requires an element of ruthlessness in choosing what to keep.

not just hybridizing excessive ordering to try out new-to-me ones requires an element of ruthlessness to make room too--
if I had unlimited space...and a garden crew...
but, if my bees create some real cuties, I'll keep 'em... somewhere

Dirt. Yeah, and that element is more difficult to maintain when the Iris Forum has so many ruthless enablers.