Native in the tropics and subtropics, the coffee plant can have 30,000 to 40,000 flowers blossoming in a year. After the first shower of the rainy season, right after dry season, the coffee plants start flowering. The beautiful flowers with 5 to 6 white petals last only a few hours and wilt as soon as fertilization has taken place. After three to four days, the flowers drop off on the ground, enabling new green beans to emerge from the same bud on the branch of the coffee shrub. To note the only two types of coffee plants cultivated, Coffea Arabica coffee plant is self-pollinating, whereas the Robusta coffee plant depends on cross pollination. However, David W. Roubik of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, reports “coffee-bean yields skyrocket when the shrubs’ flowers are visited by pollinating insects.”

That means the coffee flowers have to be seen by pollinators in a few hours to be able to have a fruitful life then. Keep in mind Insets cannot see or identify the color of white with their eyes, so how do the coffee plants survive? How do their flowers attract their pollinators?  Through evolution, the coffee flowers develop sweetly fragrance, similar to the scent of jasmine, open at night/early in the morning, so their pollinators easily find them by following their beautiful smell and get pollination work done. Coffee plants survived finally, and I shall respect them simply for all of hard work they have to do…

 

 

http://justaboutcoffee.com/index.php?file=coffeetree

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/food-thought/buzz-over-coffee

http://www.s-caffe.com/en/home/coffee-culture/coffee-encyclopaedia/the-coffee-flower.html

 

 

 

Every second, people around the world drink more than 26,000 cups of coffee. some of them may care only about the taste, and some of them may use it as a way to wake them up in the morning.

To humans, coffee is a valuable beverage crop due to its characteristic flavor, aroma, and most importantly the stimulating effects of caffeine.  While we appreciate the diverse fragrances of a cup of coffee and the stimulation of the world’s most popular drug, we know little about its origin and forget coffee is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of plant evolution.

As a crop, high land Coffee Arabica and low land Robusta are the products of the only two coffee species cultivated now in over 50 tropical countries. However, according to IRD researchers, “a total of nearly 120 wild Coffee species exist starting from their origin in Lower Guinea, colonized the whole of Equatorial Africa and the Madagascar region in 400,000 years ago.”  According to this French research organization, The true origin of coffee plants is neither the legend of the dancing goats in Ethiopia, described since the 8th Century, nor the theory of coffee species originating on the Horn of Africa before the Gondwana super-continent broke up more than 100 million years. (Courcoux)

Over the past 400,000 years, cycles of glaciation happened every 100,000 year that result in a high variability in climate and intense phases of cooling. However, during this period, the flora has survived and spread in refuge zones/biodiversity hot spots (regions suitable for forests at altitude or near oceans), such as Lower Guinea. The coffee species then diversified.

 

 

 

https://en.ird.fr/the-media-centre/scientific-newssheets/347-a-new-history-of-coffee

http://www.lahistoriaconmapas.com/atlas/africa+map/guinea-africa-map.htm