Buried deep beneath a cemetery in Ithaca, New York, there are bees. Millions of them. Researchers from Cornell University estimate that around 5.6 million ground-nesting bees have made the East Lawn Cemetery their home and have for nearly a century.
When you think of bees, you think of the classic ideal of a hive. Round with me, little concentric rings that taper out as you get to either end, with a hole in the middle essentially acting as the bee’s front door. Maybe there’s some honey gooping out of it. While some bees certainly call hives their home (though maybe not as cartoonishly perfect as the one I just described), that’s only true of a surprisingly small number of bees in the United States.
Roughly 70 percent of US bee species burrow into the ground to live mostly solitary lives out of sight.
This Cemetery Has Been Quietly Holding Millions of Bodies for Nearly a Century
A recent study published in Springer Nature Link, and detailed in Scientific American, says that the species in question, Andrena regularis, has been documented at the cemetery since at least 1935. Its presence is not new, but just how many of them there are under their is only now being understood. Over a six-week stretch in 2023, researchers used trapping and sampling methods to estimate how many bees emerged during the spring. Turns out, it was millions of them, spread across roughly 6,500 square meters.
For perspective, a typical honeybee colony might have around 30,000 individual bees. By contrast, beneath this cemetery is a sprawling megacity that would put any from cyberpunk dystopian fiction to shame. Honeybees get all the publicity, but the ground dwellers that you rarely see play a massive, overlooked role in pollination, thanks to being widespread and capable of thriving where you least expect them.
The post This Cemetery Has Been Hiding Millions of Residents for Almost 100 Years appeared first on VICE.
