Environmental History Timeline June, 1780

David Zeisberger records the arrival of European honey bees in eastern Ohio

David Zeisberger, indomitable Moravian missionary, penned his detailed observations, knowledge and experience with Native American life ways and of wild North America during the Contact Period as tentacles of pioneer settlement fingered westward across the Alleghenies. Zeisberger cataloged wildlife in later sections of his history while at his remote mission, Schoenbruun Village, near today's New Philadelphia, Ohio, most likely completing his notes during the summer of 1780.
Zeisberger noted (page 152):

Of bees, nothing was known when we came here in '72, now they are to be found in large numbers in hollow trees in the woods.

Zeisberger's fascinating history and bestiary can be viewed online here: David Zeisberger's History of Northern American Indians.

Honey bees were, and remain, agricultural partners with Western commercial agriculture. They were introduced alongside pioneer European agriculture and alongside the many species of undesired European weeds that came with imported livestock feed and crop seeds. Westward spreading exotic flowering weed species provided essential nutrition for westward spreading honey bees. Pioneer honey bees, always just ahead  of  pioneering peoples, did not reach eastern Ohio for 150 years following introduction in Virginia by 1622.

Native American agriculture produced abundance through partnerships with native pollinators, among them, butterflies, hummingbirds, ants, flies, beetles, and our numerous species of solitary bees, small semi-colonial native ground-nesting bees, and our heavyweight pollinators, bumblebees.

More on honey bees:
Colony collapse disorder CCD
First record of honey bees imported to North America

Environmental History Timeline July, 1721

Pierre de Charlevoix reports catastrophic epidemic mortality among Native American groups, abandoned anthropogenic landscapes

Pierre de Charlevoix*, French Jesuit priest touring New France in the early 18th century, authored a dispassionate record of conditions he observed during his continent-spanning travels. Charlevoix described forests, lakes, rivers, geography, travel routes, communities among the French and among Native Americans, and the successes and failures of groups and efforts to prosper in New France. Charlevoix repeatedly comments on epidemics among Native American groups. While riding a bark canoe and camping along the west shore of Lake Michigan, Charlevoix estimated epidemic mortality in New France while writing of the...

...depopulation of all the Indian nations, who are at present reduced to less than the twentieth part of what they were one hundred and fifty years ago. If this continues we shall certainly see them entirely disappear. [vol. II page 78]

Charlevoix described fallow abandoned villages and entire landscapes left to nature by lost peoples. Late in December of 1721, near present day Baton Rouge, LA, Charlevoix discovers the ruins of an ancient village in transition to a successful plantation growing mulberry, indigo, and tobacco...

The next day, we advanced eleven leagues, and encamped a little below the Bayagoulas, which we left upon our right, after having visited the ruins of an ancient village... This was very well peopled about twenty years ago; the small pox destroyed part of the inhabitants, and the rest have dispersed in such a manner, that no accounts have been heard of them for several years, and it is doubted if so much as one single family of them is now remaining. Its situation is very magnificent, and the Messrs. Paris have now a grant here, which they planted with white mulberries, and have already raised very fine silk. They have likewise begun to cultivate tobacco and indigo with success. If the proprietors of the grants were every-where as industrious, they would soon be reimbursed their expenses. [vol. II, page 284]

Close examination of documented Contact Period conditions in North America reveal the importance and real value of Native American landscape management practices preceding and facilitating pioneer settlement and successes. Many anthropogenically managed landscapes, later found in various stages of succession, predated European settlement.

*Charlevoix, Pierre-Francois-Xavier De. Journal of a Voyage to North America. London: Dodsley., 1761.