On a spring morning in 2022, Rachel Fordyce was walking her usual route to work through East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York — past old headstones, quiet paths, and clusters of trees — when something in the ground caught her attention. Bees were emerging from the soil in numbers that didn’t seem right for an ordinary Tuesday.
What Cornell University researchers would eventually find beneath that historic cemetery, established in 1878, turned out to be far larger than anyone had expected.
A morning walk that changed everything
Fordyce didn’t let it go. As a laboratory technician in Cornell’s entomology department, she collected specimens and brought them to Bryan Danforth, an entomologist at the university. Analysis identified the insects as Andrena regularis — a solitary mining bee that nests by digging tunnels into the ground rather than building hives. Unlike honeybees, it lives and works alone.
What made the find particularly notable was its apparent age. Historical records suggest Andrena regularis has been present at East Lawn since at least the early 1900s — quietly occupying the same soil for over a century while nobody noticed.
How scientists counted millions of bees underground
To measure the colony, researchers deployed 10 emergence traps across the cemetery between late March and mid-May 2023. Each covers less than one square meter of soil. A net curtain funnels emerging insects upward into a glass container — a low-tech method that yields surprisingly precise data.
Over the sampling period, the traps captured more than 3,000 insects from 16 species, including beetles and flies. Andrena regularis dominated overwhelmingly. Extrapolating from trap density across the colony’s roughly 1.25-acre footprint, the team estimated a total population of between 3 and 8 million bees. The midpoint — 5.5 million — is equivalent to more than 200 domestic honeybee hives packed beneath a single historic cemetery. The study, published in April in the journal Apidologie, documents one of the largest aggregations of subterranean bees ever recorded worldwide.
The secret life of a little-known bee
The traps also revealed details about Andrena regularis biology that hadn’t been previously documented. Males emerge from the ground several days before females during the first warm days of April, a head start that maximizes mating opportunities once females surface.
After mating, females dig individual nests and provision underground cells with pollen and nectar before laying their eggs. The species overwinters as adults underground — an unusual trait that allows it to become active early in spring.
That timing places the bees in near-perfect synchrony with flowering apple trees at nearby Cornell University orchards, making them important early-season pollinators. The monitoring also uncovered something else: Nomada imbricata bees, a parasitic species, were found laying eggs inside Andrena regularis nests at the expense of the host’s larvae. Even in an undisturbed cemetery, the underground world is far from simple.
Why cemeteries may be among our most important wildlife refuges
About 75 percent of wild bee species are solitary and nest underground. For them, soil quality and stability matter enormously — compacted, pesticide-treated, or frequently disturbed ground is essentially uninhabitable.
Old urban cemeteries offer something genuinely rare: sandy, easy-to-dig soil, no pesticide application, and long-term protection from construction or intensive agriculture. East Lawn has remained largely undisturbed for well over a century. That continuity, the researchers suggest, is precisely why the colony grew so large. The finding also pushes back against the assumption that urban environments make poor wildlife habitat — the right kind of urban land, left alone long enough, can sustain pollinator populations on a scale that surprises even the scientists studying them.
A global call to find — and protect — hidden colonies
The research team has launched a citizen science initiative asking the public to report underground bee aggregations wherever they find them. The goal is to map colonies around the world before they’re accidentally destroyed by construction, paving, or routine landscaping.
The stakes are concrete. The Ithaca colony’s role in pollinating nearby apple orchards gives it direct agricultural value — value that would vanish entirely if the cemetery’s soil were disturbed by something as routine as a drainage project. Researchers hope the study prompts land managers and city planners to look more carefully at the historic green spaces already in their care. Somewhere beneath an old churchyard or a forgotten municipal cemetery, another colony may already be waiting to be found.