A woman took a shortcut through a cemetery to avoid a parking fee and ended up in a scientific paper. Rachel Fordyce worked as a technician in an entomology laboratory at Cornell University. To avoid paying for a parking spot on campus, I used to park in a nearby plaza and walk the last stretch to work through East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York. One spring morning in 2022, as Phys.org reported, he noticed bees emerging from the grass between the tombstones, collected a handful in a jar, and brought them to the lab. It turned out to be Andrena regularis, the normal mining bee. As it happens, that cemetery is home to approximately 5.5 million of them. How to Count Five Million Bees You Can’t See No one dug up the place, for reasons that should be obvious. Instead, the team used emergency traps: small mesh tents attached to the ground with a funnel leading to a glass jar. Smithsonian Magazine reported that ten of these traps were placed in the nesting area before the 2023 season began, from late March to mid-May and captured 3,251 individual insects from 16 species of bees, flies and beetles. The mining bee dominated the route. The density per square meter, expanded across some 6,000 square meters of grass and gravestones, gave a population of between three and eight million, with 5.5 million as the midpoint. In a paper published in Apidologie, lead author Steve Hoge, a student at the lab at the time, and his co-authors argue that the find is among the largest aggregations documented in the scientific literature. One place, one season, one estimate with a wide margin on both sides. Still, that’s a staggering number of bees on less than an acre and a half. Solitary bees that have no choice in being lonely. “Aggregation” sounds like a hive, but these bees don’t share one. Mining bees have no queen, no workers, no honey, and no shared gateway. Each female digs her own burrow, fills a series of underground chambers with pollen and nectar, lays her eggs, and seals the entrance behind her. Millions of them simply fancy the same piece of land, which is roughly the insect equivalent of a suburb where no one knows their neighbors. They also come with caps. Cuckoo bees of the genus Nomada prowl burrow entrances waiting for the opportunity to lay their own eggs in someone else’s carefully stocked nursery. Lead author Bryan Danforth told Scientific American that he was stunned when the estimates came in, having previously seen published estimates exceeding hundreds of thousands. Specimens collected at the site date back to 1935, so this lot has quietly moved on for the better part of a century. Why a cemetery, specifically sandy, well-drained soil, is easy to dig. This is true whether you’re a bee with jaws or a gravedigger with a shovel, which is why so many 19th-century cemeteries ended up sitting on exactly the soil that mining bees prefer. East Lawn opened its doors in 1878. Since then, everything has worked in their favor. Speaking to National Geographic, Danforth listed the draws: not many pesticides compared to farmland or suburban lawns, decent flower diversity, quiet, and terrain that’s hardly disturbed. According to the Cornell Chronicle, Danforth estimates that about 75 percent of bee species live this way, alone and underground, making the bee an odd pet choice for the entire group. Cornell’s adjoining apple orchards are located about 500 yards from the cemetery gates. Mining bees overwinter as adults rather than larvae. This is unusual for the group and means they emerge earlier than most solitary bees, just as the apple trees are flowering. This matters more than it seems. Previous work from Cornell found that native bees are two to three times better at pollinating apples than honey bees, largely because bees search for nectar at the base of the flower and often miss the reproductive parts, while wild bees search for pollen and wander right through them. New York is the second largest apple state in the country. A few million unpaid, unmanaged, uncounted pollinators had probably already been doing much of that work long before anyone thought to count them. What’s happening now Danforth has begun surveying cemeteries across New York state and has set up a citizen science project on iNaturalist so people can record ground-nesting bees wherever they find them. He has said, clearly, that he hopes there will be larger aggregations. He has also been blunt about the risk. Pave over one of these sites and five million pollinators will disappear in an afternoon, because nothing on the surface hints at what’s beneath. That’s the uncomfortable part of an otherwise charming story. The colony sat under a path that visitors to the cemetery passed every day, for about ninety years, until someone finally looked down. About this articleThis article is for general information and reflection. It is not professional advice. For your specific situation, consult a qualified professional.
