It’s not just the bees who pollinate our flowers and crops.

Australia’s tea trees - plants in the genus Leptospermum - are almost entirely unique to our arid continent. A few species exist in New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia, but the bulk of the 87 described species are found only here.

Leptospermum means “fine seeded” but the plant’s common name comes from the early settlers throwing a few leaves in the pot to make a sort of bush tea.

Leptospermum leaves are high in vitamin C, but they also provide the source of our famous “Manuka honey” which some people believe has special antibacterial properties (tests are inconclusive, though research goes on).

This Leptospermum sp. was photographed high up in the Blue Mountains where the plant had grown into a tough little shrub on an exposed plateau. And then, after admiring the distinctive fivepetaled flowers our photographer realised she’d caught something else: a beetle and an ant meeting face to face.

Bees are not the only pollinators of flowers, and in fact ants play a massive role in ensuring flowering plants can reproduce effectively. As for the beetles, the order Coleoptera were among the first insects to start pollinating flowering plants.

Remember, “flowers” as we understand them, evolved only in the last quarter of the history of life on Earth so far. The angiosperms did not emerge until the Early Cretaceous, about 120 million years ago.

Insects, by contrast, first appeared in the Devonian, 396 million years ago. Beetles themselves came along 96 million years later. And so they had to spend 180 million years eating something other than delicious nectar... Eventually beetles adapted to feed on flowering plants and an increasing range of new insect species began to develop even more specific pollen-feeding adaptations.

The pinnacle of this evolutionary pathway is of course the superfamily Apoidea - the bees. From eating pollen and nectar they are able to sustain complex social structures, build intricate hives, and are a key part of the reproduction of tens of thousands of species of flowering plant.

Meanwhile, this ant and beetle on a tea tree somewhere in the Blue Mountains continue to do what their kind have always done. Explore their world, find food, and not worry too much about any of it.