Using the finger nails to remove most of the petals is a fast method of preparing apple flowers for hand pollination in the balloon stage. Such flowers still appeared quite attractive to insects; left to open pollination, the seed set per flower averaged two thirds of that of similarly treated, but hand-pollinated flowers. With the aid of ‘marker pollen’ of scab or mildew resistant donors and the subsequent screening of the seedling progenies for resistance, it was shown that the stray pollen was responsible on average for one of every three seeds formed by unbagged depetalled and hand-pollinated flowers.