Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Scientists at Cornell University discovered that a 1.5-acre section of East Lawn Cemetery is home to an estimated 5.5 million ground-nesting bees.
• Although honeybees live in hives, a majority of bee species actually live solitary lives and nest in the ground while pollinating some 80 percent of the world’s flowering plants.
• The study provides a detailed (and rare) glimpse at ground-nesting bees like Andrena regularis, revealing their role in natural ecosystems.

When you think about where bees live, you probably picture hives whose workers ardently protect their queen while producing honey and (thankfully) pollinating the food we eat. But that actually isn’t the typical lifestyle for most bees. In fact, more than 70 percent of bee species live solitary lives nesting in the ground, and according to the Bee Conservancy, they’re responsible for pollinating 80 percent of the world’s flowering plants—an important task, to say the least.

Now, scientists have made a surprise discovery in a cemetery in upstate New York—an estimated 5.5 million ground-nesting bees of the species Andrena regularis (a type of miner bee) who’ve made their home in the area. Reporting their discovery in the journal Apidologie, the research team from Cornell University noted that this is likely one of the largest aggregations of bees in the world.

“I’m sure there are other large bee aggregations that exist around the world that we just haven’t identified, but in terms of what is in the literature, this is one of the largest,” Steve Hoge, an undergraduate researcher at Cornell University and lead author of the study, said in the Cornell Chronicle. “This species overwinters as adults, which is relatively rare, and that’s part of the reason why they come up out of the ground so early in the spring, timed to the apple bloom.”

Those apple blooms might explain why the cemetery hosts such an impressively large population. Less than half a mile from East Lawn Cemetery lies Cornell Orchards, which was founded in 1910 and contains roughly 22 acres where apples, grapes, and stone fruits serve as an active research test bed. This fruit-based facility just so happens to provide the perfect food source for a massive population of bees.

But to better understand that population, the research team set a series of “emergence traps”—essentially a glass jar with a funnel—designed to capture bees and other insects as they come out of the ground. While the traps caught an array of species, including flies and beetles, A. regularis was by far the most numerous. Using these emergence ratios, the researchers were able to extrapolate how many bees emerged from a square meter of ground and then multiply that by the 6,000 square meters believed to house the entire population, providing a total estimate of three to 8 million (or 5.5 million, as a nice average).

Bryan Danforth—the senior author of the paper, who’s conducted field work on bees around the world—said that bees that nest in the ground are notoriously understudied, even though “it’s the most common lifestyle for bees.” For example, the most recent article Hoge and his team could find that provided useful information on A. regularis dated back to 1978.

Luckily, cemeteries provide the perfect conditions for researchers to study these creatures, as they’re well-known for being biodiversity havens. A 2023 study published in the journal Conservation Biology explained that cemeteries are just as valuable as other green urban spaces (such as parks) for local flora and fauna, and that the religious significance of the sites helps preserve them for future generations.

The superintendent of the East Lawn Cemetery, Keven Morse, spoke with Cornell Chronicle to provide his own perspective on the ghostly habitat. He said he’d seen deer, geese, hawks, foxes, and coyotes on the grounds over the years—and now, one of the world’s largest collections of ground-nesting bees.

“I just felt bad having to mow in certain areas,” he said.