In Minnesota, native maple trees typically flower before bees and other pollinators are active.

Spring’s earliest flowers are popping open: gauzy crocus clusters, squill — Siberian and striped — and snowdrops that have bloomed through snow, cold and high winds for a month. They are lovely, these Eurasian transplants that paint the earth with pockets of bright color. Our native blooms are more hidden and less showy, yet are beautiful in their unflowerlike forms.

Look up at the maple trees. Easy to miss high overhead, these blossoms are small, muted and less recognizable as flowers. Each emerges from a scarlet bud coat and glitters with golden, translucent filaments tipped in auburn pollen. They remind me of minute, single-celled creatures that we might see in a drop of water under a microscope, or of the tiny squiggly animals living on a coral reef — beauty suspended in air rather than water.

Male flowers of the silver maple (Acer saccharinum) are packed with pollen for wind dispersal.

The female flowers of red maples (Acer rubrum) remind me of tiny coral reef creatures.

Oh, and even if we don’t notice the flowers overhead, if you are allergic to tree pollen, your “nose knows” that maples are blooming! Why do they disperse so much pollen? In most years, maples and a few other trees bloom before native bees and honey bees are active. The early-flowering trees depend on indirect wind pollination. Male flowers produce copious pollen to successfully fertilize female flowers on other maples.