This dataset includes hand pollination, honey bee pollination and pollen germination experiments described in the article "Pollination and plant reproductive success of two ploidy levels in red clover (Trifolium pratense L.)", published in Frontiers in Plant Science (DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2021.720069). 

In a series of hand pollination experiments, the influence of visitation rate (10, 20, 40, 80 pollinated florets per flower head) on the seed number per pollinated floret and seed number per flower head were investigated, respectively. The influence of flowering stage (early, middle, and full flowering) on the seed number per pollinated floret was also investigated. Self-incompatibility was studied by comparing the seed number per flower head under self-pollination and interploidy pollination treatments. In order to study the autonomous pollination, we compared the seed number per flower head between self-pollination and control treatment.

In the honey bee pollination experiments, we investigated the overall seed number per floret and compare the number of one-seeded and two-seeded florets in the studied red clover cultivars. Further, we investigated the pollen germination rate of each red clover cultivar. 

The main findings of this article include: 

(1) In hand pollination, increasing the visitation rates increased the seed number per flower head, but reduced the seed number per pollinated floret;

(2) In hand pollination, different flowering stages did not influence the seed number per pollinated floret significantly;

(3) In honey bee pollination, diploid red clover cultivars had more two-seeded florets compared to tetraploids.