Four questions ...

Question

1) How can you account for the observation that a mass or colony of bacteria shows pigmentation while the individual cells have transparent cytoplasm?

2) What factors may alter the expression of the cultural characteristics of bacteria?

3) Before doing a spore stain, what information from a gram stain may assist in preliminary determination for the presence of spores?

4) What bacterial structural characteristics could be useful with the light microscope in eventual identification of species?

Thank you. :-)