It's no bother, twins. I'd much rather talk about stuff like this than how to start a pineapple! :-p

I've never had any seeds set up on P. alatisepala without hand-pollinating it (with another Portea), but I don't know if that necessarily means it couldn't have been self-pollinated by some insect. It also could have gotten some Aechmea pollen on it the same way. I've never tried selfing it or doing bigenerics with it, so I guess you'll just have to grow them out and see what comes out of it.

Portea petropolitana v. extensa is a notorious cross-pollinator, though. It will cross easily with Aechmeas and all kinds of other things. Every time I've collected seed from it thinking it had selfed it turned out to have crossed with some Aechmea or other. P. alatisepala doesn't seem quite so promiscuous but it could share some of those tendencies. Neos are in the same subfamily too, but Porteas and Aechmeas are much more closely related, so that would be my prime suspect. Which Aechmeas were blooming at the same time?

All it takes is one seed in the berry to make it turn blue (or purple or black). Sometimes they'll even do that and you won't find any seeds inside at all. I'm not sure why that happens, but usually if you only find one or two on an inflorescence that have changed color it means they've been pollinated. If there were only a few seeds it just means it wasn't very WELL pollinated. Pollen consists of a bunch of individual cells, or pollen grains, and each one is responsible for producing one seed, so if only a couple of pollen grains made contact with the stigma there will only be a couple of seeds. It's just like a sperm and egg thing but there are hundreds of eggs. That's why you can get different crosses out of the same batch of seedlings if more than one type of pollen got onto it, including its own. Obviously when you're hybridizing you want to try to avoid this so you can keep track of what the cross is, but this may explain some of the hybrids listed in the registry that show no characteristics of the presumed pollen parent, or that show traits that couldn't possibly have come from either of the named parents.

I've never seen any seed set on a Portea petropolitana v. extensa , but have seen a large batch of supposed Aechmea blanchetiana seedlings that definetly had pollen from it .

Hi, Lisa. Sorry it took so long to thank you for the response, but I FINALLY went down to south fl. and got a ton of bromeliads. I just got back and will start those seeds... hopefully something nice will come of it.