Columbian Exchange

Are honey bees native to North America? USGS

• https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-honey-bees-native-north-america Dec 6, 2022 "Honey bees are not native to North America. They were originally imported from Europe in the 17th century. Honey bees now help pollinate many U.S. crops like fruits and nuts." U.S. Geological Survey

How many species of native bees are in the United States? USGS

• https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-species-native-bees-are-united-states Dec 6, 2022 "There are over 20,000 known bee species in the world, and 4,000 of them are native to the United States...Native bees are the primary insect pollinator of agricultural plants in most of the country. Crops that they pollinate include squash, tomatoes, cherries, blueberries, and cranberries. Native bees were here long before European honeybees were brought to the country by settlers (honeybees are not native to North America)." U.S. Geological Survey

Rice in the Lowcountry Lowcountry Digital Library

• https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/africanpassageslowcountryadapt/sectionii_introduction/rice_lowcountry Dec 6, 2022 "After rice grains came to Carolina in the late seventeenth century, enslaved West Africans in Carolina from rice-growing regions most likely grew rice for subsistence food. It was not until the eighteenth century that Carolina planters had amassed the local capital, enslaved labor force, economic entrepreneurship, and plantation cultivation system to support a major rice export industry." African Passages, Lowcountry Adaptations

Tracing Mexico’s Complicated Relationship With Rice Aatish Taseer

• https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/t-magazine/mexico-rice-conquest.html Nov 11, 2021 "Having arrived in the country via the Spanish Conquest, the grain’s presence poses the question: What’s native, and what isn’t, when it comes to a nation’s culinary history...Rice had come to Mexico shortly after the Spanish conquest of the 1520s. It was a time when Spain and Portugal were spreading their tentacles across the globe: The Portuguese viceroy Alfonso de Albuquerque’s conquest of Goa, on the west coast of India, occurred nine years before the conquistador Hernán Cortés’s 1519 march on Mexico. Some four decades later, Spanish vessels known as the Manila Galleons first brought rice to Mexico from the Philippines. What interested me was what place this Old World staple, come via Asia through Europe to the New World, held in the lives of these people who had a mythical attachment to corn." The New York Times Style Magazine

How the Potato Changed the World Charles C. Mann

• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/ Nov 1, 2011 "Brought to Europe from the New World by Spanish explorers, the lowly potato gave rise to modern industrial agriculture...Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. But in the 18th century the tuber was a startling novelty, frightening to some, bewildering to others—part of a global ecological convulsion set off by Christopher Columbus...Compared with grains, tubers are inherently more productive." Smithsonian Magazine

Cooking in Early Virginia Indian Society Helen C. Rountree

• https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/cooking-in-early-virginia-indian-society Dec 7, 2020 "Early Virginia Indians hunted, fished, and collected wild grains and berries, which they prepared in various ways. Meats were roasted, while grains and tubers were pounded into ashcakes and then baked. For many millennia, boiling water was difficult, but by the Late Woodland Period (AD 900–1600), technology had improved among the Powhatan Indians of Virginia such that a large ceramic stew pot became the focus of family eating." Encyclopedia Virginia

• December 3, 1586, Spuds Rick Long

• https://todayinhistory.blog/2017/12/03/december-3-1586-spuds-2 Dec 3, 2017 ICYMI – "ICYMI – Today, potatoes are the 5th largest crop on the planet, following rice, wheat, maize and sugar cane.  Almost 5,000 varieties are preserved in the International Potato Center in Peru. Spanish Conquistadors who arrived in Peru in 1532 eventually brought potatoes home to Spain.  The first written mention of the potato comes from a delivery receipt dated November 28, 1567, between the Grand Canaries and Antwerp...Sir Walter Raleigh first introduced potatoes to Ireland in 1589." Today in History