Scientists Discovered 5.6 Million Bees Beneath a New York State Cemetery

This huge aggregation of bees is one of the largest and oldest ever recorded, new study finds

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Andrea Thompson

A New York state cemetery could be home to nearly 5.6 million ground-nesting bees, a study suggests. new study. The colony is one of the largest ever recorded and probably one of the oldest, the researchers note.

Although bees are often represented as hive inhabitantsthe vast majority of species of these insects in the United States (about 70%) are actually ground nesting beesor bees digging in the ground. These bees are often solitary, meaning they nest alone rather than in large groups, says Bryan Danforth, a professor of entomology at Cornell University and lead author of the new study.

Scientists know that one species of these bees, regular adrenaline has been at East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York, since at least 1935. (The cemetery dates to 1878.) But no one knew exactly how many bees lived there.

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For about a month and a half in 2023, researchers from Cornell University collected bees from various sites around the cemetery and estimated how many members of A. regular lived underground.

They discovered an “extraordinary abundance,” the scientists write in their article published Monday in the journal Apidology.

Specifically, the group estimated that 5.56 million bees “emerged” – ventured out to forage and mate – in spring 2023 over an area of ​​about 6,500 square meters. (For reference, the authors note, a bee colony typically consists of about 30,000 individuals. On apple farms, where Danforth has conducted extensive research, you can find about two or three colonies per hectare, or about two football fields.)

“I was completely stunned when we did the calculations,” Danforth says. “I’ve seen published estimates of bee aggregations in the hundreds of thousands. But I never really imagined that would be 5.56 million bees.

A study in Arizona, the authors note, there are an estimated 1,615,000 Centris caesalpiniae bees emerged from a 1,290 square meter site in one year. Another study totaled 651,440 Melissodes bimaculatus bees on a suburban lawn in upstate New York, while a third study it is estimated that there were around 13,500 painted by Epicharis bees on a 160 square meter site in Brazil.

The new research highlights the importance of cemeteries as habitat for ground-nesting bees – an “exceptionally important” pollinator, Danforth says.

“Solitaire bees are totally underappreciated. I spend a lot of time trying to encourage people to appreciate solitary bees, just because they do so many things and they’re kind of under the radar,” Danforth adds. “But they are fascinating creatures.”