Biosphere

The biosphere is made up of the parts of the Earth where life exists. The biosphere extends from the deepest root systems of trees to the dark environment of ocean trenches, to lush rainforests and high mountain tops. The biosphere has existed for about 3.5 billion years.

About 135 million years ago the vast supercontinent of Gondwana was beginning to break up, with South America drifting off to the west of Africa, and Australia moving majestically off to the east. This ancient time is known as the Cretaceous. The continents were clothed in forests of tree ferns, cycads, huge horsetails, and conifers. The air swarmed with primitive insects including oversized dragonflies and early butterflies.

At this time, almost all plants scattered their pollen on the wind, hoping to pollinate a female plant somewhere. Evolution arrived at a more successful method in the form of insects. Pollen is very nutritious. Some winged insects began to feed upon it, becoming specialists in eating pollen—the insect grazing transferred pollen from plant to plant. Insect pollination of plants had commenced.

The earliest angiosperms ( flowering plants ) are generally accepted to be from the Early Cretaceous.

Coevolution

Insects and angiosperms co-evolved, with insects pollinating angiosperms and angiosperms providing new ecological opportunities for insects.

Floral Evolution

Angiosperms evolved showy bisexual flowers with radial symmetry, which indicated specialised insect pollination. The evolution of bees can be traced back millions of years, with bees likely appearing 130 million years ago. Bees now comprise more than 20,000 species.

Anthecology

Bees evolved from wasps and initially formed hives underground. Therefore, throughout their evolution, bees must protect their hive from pathogens deep within the biosphere.

Seventy-five percent of the biomass of the biosphere is microbial. The bees learned to protect their hive and stored honey from microbial soil pathogens by producing antibiotics in the honey, the propolis and the comb. After hundreds of millions of years of protecting the hive and colony, pathogens will not circumvent these antibiotics. All antibiotic resistance has been dealt with over time.

Australian stingless bees, of more than 2,000 species, produce a honey with remarkable germ killing properties. However, each hive can only produce less than a kilogram of honey yearly. The volume is too low for medicinal honey commercialisation.

One of the many Australian plant species that gives the stingless bee honey its bioactivity is Tea Tree (Leptospermum species)

Apis Mellifera

The European honey bee, Apis mellifera, can produce much larger volumes of honey per season than the Australian native bees.