150 million years ago, flowering plants first appeared on Earth. This was an extremely important event in Earth¹s history, because for the first time, nutrients became concentrated into plant structures, called fruits and vegetables. The development of fruits and vegetables was a pre-condition for the evolution of man. Fruits and vegetables provided mammals with the food they needed to have in order to evolve. In other words, without bees and flowering plants, humans may not have evolved at all.

Since their first appearance on this planet, flowering plants and bees formed a symbiotic partnership. In other words, they developed a relationship in which they both helped each other, in extremely important, and mutually beneficial ways.

Pollen is the male reproductive spore of the plants. Flowers produce pollen to fertilize other flowers. But for this to happen, pollen must get from the flower of one plant to fertilize the flower of another plant. How does it happen? As everyone knows, bees do the work, depositing pollen from flower to flower. When bees visit flowers, they fertilize them by spreading the pollen that they collected from previous plants. This simple act, repeated over and over again, becomes the force that re-starts the life cycle of our planet every spring. It is the genesis of the food chain.

This is obviously an important service for the plant, but how does the bee benefit? Bees collect pollen for food. The lifespan of a worker bee is only 7-8 weeks. Bees accomplish a tremendous amount of work during that short period of time, and their metabolisms run at very high levels. Just as a racecar needs more powerful fuel to run well and fast, bees require a high-intensity diet to satisfy their nutritional requirements. Besides honey, which provides calories to burn as fuel, bee pollen is all that bees eat. In the evolutionary process, pollen that bees collect has evolved into the richest fuel possible. Pollen provides the nutritional building blocks needed to nurture the young and grow the population of the hive. In the spring, when bees start to bring pollen back to the hive, that is a signal to the Queen that she can start laying eggs. Pollen, then, is essential nutrition for the bees. Since both the bees and the flowers benefit, their relationship is called a symbiotic relationship.

The Evolution of Bee Pollen

The development of every plant and animal on the planet was shaped by evolution. Evolution is driven by gene mutations, or genetic accidents. Most mutations cause detrimental changes that cause the plant or animal to die. However, on very rare occasions, beneficial mutations occur, and these are passed on to successive generations-as Nature selects for stronger, more optimal individuals‹or in popular terms 'survival of the fittest'. Beneficial mutations allow plant and animals to develop a competitive edge over similar plants in the battle for reproduction and survival.

Here¹s an example: in the rainforest, there is a huge variety of plants. In fact, there are so many plants that they battle each other for space and sunlight. The trees that have evolved to grow the tallest, and the fastest, out-compete the other trees in the race for sunlight. They are the plants that win the battle for survival. However, this may be temporary, because other plants are evolving to become more competitive with the leaders. Evolution is an on-going competition.

In much the same way that rainforest trees compete for sunlight, flowering plants compete with each other for the bees services. The ability of a flowering plant to attract bees translates directly into their reproductive success. If bees give a greater share of attention to a certain species of plant, then that plant will propagate more and will become the dominant plant in the area. While bees collect pollen from all types of plants, they show preferences for certain types of pollen. The pollen that is most attractive to bees, naturally, is pollen that provides the best nutrients for their health. In this plant competition, reproductive success is driven by the ability to evolve the most nutritious pollen that will attract the most bees. Plants with lower quality pollen are then driven to evolve higher quality pollen in order to become more competitive for the bees attention.

150 million years of this evolutionary pressure has driven bee pollen to become more and more nutritionally superior. The end product of this process of natural selection is bee pollen with high intensity nutrition.