Which brings up another point of contention: how long does a species have to be here, before it's considered native? And are all original species considered worthy of worship?

 

 The Cheyenne Ethnobotanist and Tribal Elder tells me that his culture has no time in their oral history when honey bees did not occur in the west.  



He says that the warriors out on their ponies would look for bee colonies in trees.  When one was spotted, the spotter would shoot an arrow into the tree by the nest to mark the location and claim it.  In the winter, they'd come back to get the honey.


It's hard to say when the honey bee arrived - clearly not with the 13 colonies.  Maybe earlier, and maybe not just on the east coast, but as far as into the Heartland via the Great Lakes - or was there possibly bees already here.   It's not like we have a ready fossil history.


I know that oral history can be inaccurate, but in MT, we had an oral history of the Native Americans practicing fire ecology long before anyone else that followed even considered the practice.  I've colleagues who have confirmed that the native americans indeed kept meadows open by dragging burning logs behind horses.  The evidence is in drawings in old explorer and trapper journals AND by fire scorch marks on old forest trees.


And, as we know, there was a discovery in the SW of a bee in amber that looks a lot like our current honey bee - I doubt anyone hundreds of years ago would know how to distinguish it from what we call a honey bee.



Look how far off the mark was what we were taught about Columbus Discovering America, and what a great man he was, and how we should celebrate the day that a slaver found some islands that he thought were India! 



Custer's Last Stand had a similar 'fake' news.  The Cheyenne and Crow - of whom I have childhood friends, always told a very different story - read Woodenlegs biography.  Only very recently have the anthropologist's studying the site confirmed the Native American version.  



So, I'm not any more convinced that the 13 colonies first introduced bees, than I am that maybe it was Viking or Icelandic explorers, or maybe even earlier colonist's, or that there may have been an Apis bee already here.


What we do know fairly surely is that the honey bees seems to have been here when the colonist's arrive.  So, if we want to get rid of invasive species, we need to start with the European settlers and all of their progeny who took over the continent by force.


I'll give the Native Americans credit for beating everyone else here by a long enough time to be considered native, and they did probably get here by walking, a natural expansion of a species - not by jumping ecosystems, like loading up in boats and crossing an ocean.



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