A quiet cemetery in upstate New York is proving far from still, as new research shows it is buzzing with millions of bees living just beneath the surface. The East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca is home to an estimated 5.5 to 5.6 million ground-nesting bees, making it one of the largest and possibly oldest known bee aggregations ever recorded, researchers at Cornell University have found.
The bees belong to the species Andrena regularis, or the regular mining bee, a solitary species that nests in the ground rather than forming hives. While bees are often associated with large colonies such as those seen in honeybees, scientists say roughly 70 per cent of bee species in the United States actually live underground and operate independently.
The discovery began almost by accident in 2022, when a Cornell technician noticed large numbers of bees while walking through the cemetery and brought samples back to the lab. That observation prompted a more detailed study, led by entomologist Bryan Danforth, to determine the scope of the bees living under the graves. During several weeks in the spring of 2023, researchers placed small emergence traps across the cemetery to catch bees as they surfaced, and by measuring how many emerged from specific patches of land, they calculated a population density across roughly 6,000 to 6,500 square metres, with an average of about 5.5 million bees.
“I was completely floored when we did the calculations,” Danforth told Scientific American. “I have seen published estimates of bee aggregations in the hundreds of thousands. But I never really imagined that it would be 5.56 million bees.” The cemetery’s undisturbed soil, minimal pesticide use and rarely disrupted ground create near-perfect nesting conditions, while the nearby Cornell Orchards and other flowering plants provide a steady, abundant food supply.
The new research makes clear that cemeteries can double as important habitat for ground-nesting bees. “The solitary bees are totally underappreciated,” Danforth told Scientific American. “I spend a lot of time trying to encourage people to appreciate the solitary bees, just because they do so much, and they’re kind of under the radar. But they’re fascinating creatures.”
