New York graveyard hides a vast underground city of solitary bees
At East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, NY, researchers counted about 5.56 million solitary mining bees (Andrena regularis) nesting in the soil—roughly as many individuals as 200 honeybee hives—making it one of the largest known ground-nesting bee aggregations. Each female digs her own burrow, with no hive or queen, and the cemetery’s long-term undisturbed soil provides ideal habitat. The count highlights the ecological importance of unmanaged urban greenspace for pollinators, though the study notes it reflects bee numbers, not pollination output, and was published by Cornell researchers in Apidologie 2026.
