The "bulbs" are not bulbs, they are nodes where new growths or new flowering stems might grow if the flowering stem was still attached to the mother plant.

The jargon word for those baby plants is Keikis (babies) and a few years are required to get the babies up to flowering size.

Yeah I've been told that won't work but I tried it anyways. There's not a rooting system. Some laboratories have a way to "save" them but it's all done under sterile conditions in test-tubes with complicated equipment and gels.

It will not work because a stem doesn't have any food reserves. Nothing wrong with a little experiment, perhaps you got the idea from reading about other orchid types such as soft-cane Dendrobiums where the flowers come from the side of pseudo-bulbs/canes and keikis will grow if the pseudobulb/cane is cut off and and laid in damp sand.

Oh there's some company in the UK that makes videos on Youtube. This guy does something with little pieces of Phaleonopsis flowerspike but he still hasn't shown an update. I guess it would be called plant tissue culture or micropropagation. Too difficult for me but supposedly roots grow and die and grow and die in a test-tube.

This post was edited by CooperDR on Mon, Nov 24, 14 at 20:09