A Quiet Cemetery Hides Millions of Helpful Wild Bees

Beneath the quiet lawns of a cemetery in Ithaca, New York, scientists have uncovered an astonishing hidden city: an estimated 5.5 million wild bees nesting in the soil. Described on May 28, 2026, the aggregation of ground-nesting bees is among the largest and oldest ever documented, a vast, buzzing community that has likely thrived there for more than a century.

The discovery began by happy accident. Rachel Fordyce, who worked in an entomology lab at Cornell University, often parked nearby and walked through East Lawn Cemetery on her way to the office. One spring day in 2022 she arrived carrying a jar of bees and told her supervisor, entomologist Bryan Danforth, “These are all over the cemetery.” That casual observation grew into a full study, published in the journal Apidologie.

“5 million wild bees nesting in the soil.”

Using mesh traps to count the insects as they emerged, the team estimated more than 800 bees per square meter, an extraordinary density. The bees, a species called Andrena regularis, are solitary, gentle, ground-nesting pollinators rather than hive-dwelling honeybees. Researchers note that roughly three-quarters of all bee species nest in the ground like these, making them the most common, if least noticed, kind of bee. Their emergence is timed to spring blossoms, which makes them valuable pollinators for nearby apple orchards and other crops.

The cemetery turned out to be an ideal refuge precisely because it is peaceful, rarely disturbed, and largely free of pesticides, with sandy soil the bees favor. At a time of widespread worry about pollinator decline, the find is a heartening reminder that wild bees can flourish in the unlikeliest of places, and that protecting quiet, undisturbed green spaces can quietly sustain the small creatures our food supply depends on.