A stamen is the part of a flower that makes pollen. If you've ever looked closely at a lily or a sunflower, you've probably seen stamens: they're those thin stalks sticking up from the center, each topped with a little knob covered in yellow dust. That dust is pollen, which flowers need to create seeds and reproduce.

Most flowers have several stamens arranged in a ring. The thin stalk part is called the filament, and the knobby top that holds the pollen is called the anther. When a bee or butterfly lands on a flower, it brushes against the stamens and gets pollen stuck to its body. When that insect visits the next flower, some of that pollen rubs off onto the female part of the flower (called the pistil), and that's how pollination happens.

You can remember stamens as the male parts of flowers, the ones that produce the pollen that makes new seeds possible.