How can plants like Tomatoes, Jalapenos … grow fruits without being pollinated? Like inside in a grow tent or anything similar?
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Cross pollination. Simply, artificial insemination for plants. This is how we can ensure desired traits pass down for the next offsprings.
Certain insects help take pollen (mating substance) to another plant of the same species, and their mating pollen mixes and helps fertilise the plant.
In the same way that mammals use sperm to fertilise eggs, it is the same system, but plants cant move to have sex. So some insects do it for them.
In some poly tunnels, it may be that humans use earbuds or similar items to make sure that plants mate.
Edit: also the wind and crawling bugs can create the same way of plants mixing their important breeding parts.
If there are no bugs in the environment the plants can be manually pollinated.
Manual pollination can be done in various ways, often a soft paint brush is used to pass pollen between flowers.
I have one habanero plant here and it gets fruits, there are no insects and I didn’t use a brush or anything else. This is cross pollination?
Bees are not the only ways to pollinate.
As said, some plants self-pollinate, normally by having the male and female flower parts very close together, so that just light disturbance will pollinate.
Some flowers are pollinated by non-bee insects, or by birds or bats, or non-flying animals that like to eat pollen or nectar such as some varieties of rodent or lizard.
Many plants are pollinated by the wind, with their pollen shaped so that it may be easily swept-up and carried by the wind, and their female flowers shaped to catch it.
And of course, some plants are pollinated primarily by humans doing it intentionally for agriculture. This is actually how tomatoes in hothouses have typically been pollinated; someone goes around with a little probe that they use to gather pollen and then deposit it. Some though modern tomato varieties are self-pollinating, someone still needs to come ensure the transfer occurs. People are actually starting to allow bees into hothouses or even introduce them for the purpose.
In the absence of bees, many plants need to be pollinated by hand. Workers use brushes to brush pollen on the plants manually. This is being done increasingly in China, where pollutants and insecticides have largely destroyed bee populations in some areas. Imagine a huge field of crops, and someone has to brush every flower with some dust. Crazy. We need bees!
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