A Vanilla farmer shows how to hand pollinate a vanilla bean in East Sepik, Papua New Guinea,
Vanilla Beans can only be naturally pollinated by a bee called the melipona bee which can only be found in Mexico, everywhere else vanilla is grown from Papua New Guinea and Madagascar , the vanilla bean has to be pollinated by hand.
Once the vanilla bean begins to flower it can take up to 9 months before the bean matures, it then takes another 2-3 curing the vanilla bean months before it can be sold.
This is one of the reasons vanilla is so expensive.
Despite only being introduced to PNG in the 1960s, Papua New Guinea is regarded as producing some of the finest vanilla in the world.
