I'm fine with stipulating "mostly wiped out" rather than "eradicated" as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country. They were brought here as livestock.
Things like this usually start with some seed of general knowledge or trivia --- in my case, it's listening to EconTalk, which had an episode with a bee economist talking about the misconceptions about colony collapse. But in an HN thread, you usually need something more specific than the general vibe of an EconTalk episode, so you go do a bunch of reading.
It's fun! It's like competitive librarianing.
(For what it's worth: that's not what I do in infosec and crypto threads.)
Of course. There's no deep ecological need for wild honeybees to exist in North America.