Wild vanilla orchids and Melipona bees

[Mike Vidal]

Vanilla is the 2nd most expensive spice on the planet, just behind saffron, and a very unique bee that is nearly extinct is behind the vanilla orchid's proliferation.

Almost every vanilla bean in the world is, sort of, a Mexican vanilla bean. Here's why...

https://www.vanillapura.com/pages/vanilla-bee-extinction

[Ken Cameron]

As the world's leading authority on the biology of Vanilla and related orchids, I feel compelled to address some of the misleading and erroneous information presented in this anti-evolution, pro-creationist video. Orchid flowers are notorious for the way in which they use deception (showy flowers with no reward of pollen or nectar) to lure foraging animal pollinators. From the bee's point of view this in not a symbiotic 'intelligent design' in which the bee is the only insect that "knows" how to pollinate the flower. In fact, the bee exits the flower with nothing to show for its effort, but accidentally transfers pollen from anther to stigma on the way out. It is certainly not flying around pollinating Vanilla flowers to produce fruits for our enjoyment! Charles Darwin wrote an entire book on the subject immediately after 'Origin of Species' in response to critics who said he failed to provide adequate examples in support of his theory of evolution by natural selection. It's still a great read!
Finally, there is a bit of racism reflected here ... today most scholars credit an African slave boy on the island of Reunion (Edmond Albius) with figuring out how to hand pollinate Vanilla flowers outside of Mexico, not the Belgian botanist Charles Morren, who, incidentally, got it wrong . . . Melipona bees are too small to effect pollination in wild Vanilla. It is a species of large euglossine bee that seems to be the actual pollinator of this particular species - one of >100 species in the genus Vanilla.
If you'd like to learn more, buy my book, 'Vanilla Orchids: Natural History & Cultivation' published by Timber Press!

[Mike Vidal]

Interesting article.  Thanks for your scholarship in regards to Vanilla Orchids.