5.5M Bees Found Thriving in New York Cemetery

A jar of bees collected during a morning walk just led to one of the most remarkable wildlife discoveries in recent history.

Rachel Fordyce, a lab technician at Cornell University, noticed unusual bee activity while cutting through East Lawn Cemetery on her way to work in Ithaca, New York. She scooped up a jar of the buzzing insects and brought them to her boss, Cornell Professor of Entomology Bryan Danforth.

What seemed like a curious roadside find turned into something extraordinary. The bees were identified as Andrena regularis, commonly known as regular mining bees, an important pollinator species that nests underground.

Further investigation revealed the cemetery harbors an estimated 5.5 million individual bees spread across just 1.5 acres. That's the equivalent of more than 200 honeybee hives in an area smaller than two football fields.

The discovery represents one of the largest and oldest recorded aggregations of ground-nesting bees in the world. The population density is staggering, with more than three times as many bees as there are people in Manhattan, all thriving in a quiet corner of upstate New York.

Why This Inspires

This discovery reminds us that wild spaces don't always look wild. While conservationists often focus on pristine habitats, this bustling bee metropolis proves that nature can flourish in managed landscapes like cemeteries, parks, and gardens.

Steve Hoge, who graduated from Cornell in 2024, recently published a study in the journal Apidologie using the East Lawn Cemetery population as a case study. His research, conducted in Danforth's lab during his undergraduate years, provides valuable insights into how these mining bees organize their massive underground communities.

The cemetery's groundskeepers had unknowingly created perfect conditions for the bees by maintaining open ground with minimal disturbance. It's a powerful example of how small land management decisions can have outsized impacts on wildlife.

The bees have likely been there for decades, pollinating flowers and supporting the local ecosystem while going largely unnoticed by visitors. Now that researchers know what they're looking at, they can study how these remarkable insects coordinate such a massive colony and what lessons might help protect other pollinator populations facing decline.

Sometimes the biggest nature stories aren't happening in remote wilderness areas but right beneath our feet in the places we pass every day.