VANILLA - A Little History!

VANILLA -  A Little History! Nearly everyone has enjoyed a yummybowl of vanilla ice cream.  It is a wonderfully delicious dessert. However, vanilla ice cream wouldn't even exist if evolution were true.  Let's start out with a little history. Until more recent times, Mexico was the only producer of vanilla. In the 1520s, a man by the name of Hernán Cortés traveled down to Mexico and loved vanilla. So he brought some back with him to Europe. For the next 300 years, the Europeans tried but were never able to produce vanilla. You see, vanilla grows up a tree as a vine. Eventually the vine produces an orchid.  In order to make the vanilla bean,the orchid must be pollinated.  The problem is, it only blooms one morning per year for pollination. If it isn't pollinated within 12 hours, it withers. To make things more difficult, a hood like membrane covers the part of the vanilla orchid which produces pollen. This makes the production of the vanilla bean very difficult.  In 1836, Charles François Antoine Morren traveled down to Mexico to figure out why they weren't able to produce vanilla beans in Europe.  As Morren was studying the vanilla orchids, his attention was drawn to a little bee (the Mexican Melipona Bee). This bee landed on the orchid, lifted up the little hood like membrane, collected pollen, and then flew off to the next flower.  This bee was pollinating the orchids. After some time, the orchid produced a vanilla bean.   To this day, the Mexican Melipona Bee is the only insect that knows how to pollinate the vanilla orchid.   This simple fact puts evolution in an extremely difficult position. Without the Mexican Melipona Bee, we simply would not have vanilla today. The bee and the vanilla vine had to be made at the exact same time. Not to mention, this bee had to be given specific information about how to pollinate the vanilla orchid. Again, no other insect knows how to do this. This bee had to be made, designed, and purposefully created to pollinate the vanilla orchid, and thus, produce vanilla. So much of our world points to the Creator. As silly as it sounds, even vanilla ice cream proclaims the glory of God.

We are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:20-21).