Female or Male?

No I'm not referring to the baby in my belly, we already know he's a boy!
Back in December when we went to the Anheuser-Busch party at the OSU campus I had a very interesting conversation with one of the wives of the guys Denzil works with. Her name is Vicky and she's so wild and crazy. She started telling me that there was a difference between pine cones...there are male ones and female ones. I thought this women was absolutely crazy and it was after a few hours of being there so I thought maybe she had had a little too much to drink. So I was intrigued and asked what she was talking about. She said that she had done research years and years ago for one of her daughters school papers and how God is one amazing God because he even made pine cones male and female. I sat there and listened and just thought she was blowing smoke but....sure enough I searched for it on the internet and it is true....

The cone is the reproductive structure of a conifer.
Its form is that of a very short branch with many small, rounded, leaf-like structures (scales) attached to a central stem.
A female cone lives and grows for several years, becoming much larger than a male cone.
An ovule develops on each scale of a female cone. Inside the ovule, an egg cell is produced. If fertilization occurs, an embryo grows inside the ovule. The ovule hardens, becoming a seed.
Eventually the scales spread, allowing the seeds to fall. If conditions are favorable where it falls, the embryo inside the pine seed will grow into a new tree.
Male cones live only a few weeks. On each tiny scale of a male cone, a pollen sac develops, inside which pollen grains are formed. Each pollen grain is a protective container for a sperm cell.
When mature pollen is released, the male cones die and fall apart.
Pollen is carried by the wind, and some of the pollen grains land between the scales of female cones, resulting in fertilization.

Okay...the words sperm, fertilization, ovule, embryo...those are words I never expected to use talking about pine cones. But there you go folks...you learn something new everyday don't you?