5.5 Million Ground Bees Found Beneath Ithaca Cemetery

A massive colony of ground-nesting bees, estimated at 5.5 million individuals, has been discovered thriving beneath a historic cemetery in Ithaca, New York. The aggregation, one of the largest ever documented, was found by chance and highlights the potential of urban green spaces as vital refuges for pollinators.

The discovery began in the spring of 2022 when Rachel Fordyce, a laboratory technician at Cornell University, noticed an unusual number of bees during her regular walk through East Lawn Cemetery. She collected specimens and brought them to her supervisor, entomology professor Bryan Danforth. They were identified as Andrena regularis, commonly known as the regular mining bee, a solitary species that digs nests underground rather than living in hives.

To study the population, researchers placed ten small mesh emergence traps across the cemetery between late March and mid-May of 2023. The traps funneled insects emerging from the soil into collection jars. From over 3,200 captured insects representing 16 species, A. regularis was overwhelmingly dominant. By calculating the average density of bees caught, the team estimated the total population across the 1.5-acre site to be...