In spring 2022, an Ithaca, New York, resident named Rachel Fordyce noticed something strange in East Lawn Cemetery. Patches of bare soil between the headstones were alive with movement: thousands of small bees rising from the ground, hovering just inches above the earth, then disappearing back into tiny holes. According to a Cornell University news release, Fordyce contacted the university, and what followed has reshaped how entomologists think about wild pollinators hiding in plain sight.
Researchers who visited the site and conducted fieldwork the following spring now estimate that roughly 5.5 million ground-nesting bees occupy a 1.5-acre section of the cemetery, making it the largest documented wild bee aggregation on Earth. Their findings, published in the journal Apidologie and summarized in the April 2026 Cornell release, describe a colony dominated by a single species, Andrena regularis, that researchers estimate has been tunneling beneath this quiet burial ground for more than a century, though no independent dating evidence such as soil core analysis or historical records has been published to confirm that timeline.
Millions of bees, counted one trap at a time
Between March 30 and May 16, 2023, a team led by Cornell entomologist Bryan Danforth deployed 10 soil emergence traps across the cemetery plot. Each trap covered 0.36 square meters and captured bees as they surfaced from their underground nests. The traps collected 3,251 individual bees spanning 16 species, with Andrena regularis accounting for the vast majority.
By scaling the trap-level density across the full nesting area of approximately 6,000 square meters, the team arrived at the 5.5 million estimate. In the Cornell release, Danforth compared the colony to the equivalent of more than 200 honeybee hives living underground, a framing that captures just how densely packed the aggregation is relative to managed bee populations. “It’s like having more than 200 honeybee hives, but underground,” Danforth said, according to the university account.
Despite the staggering numbers, these bees pose virtually no threat to cemetery visitors. Andrena regularis is a solitary mining bee. Each female digs her own tunnel and provisions individual brood cells with pollen. The bees are not aggressive, rarely sting, and lack the defensive swarming behavior of honeybees or yellowjackets. A person walking through the cemetery during peak emergence might see a low haze of bees drifting over the soil and never realize millions more were nesting underfoot.
Why a cemetery is the perfect habitat
The location is not a coincidence. Andrena regularis needs compacted, well-drained soil with sparse vegetation to dig its branching tunnels and brood cells, which can extend 20 to 40 centimeters below the surface. Foundational research on the species’ nest architecture, archived at the University of Illinois, documented how millions of individual burrows can coexist in a compact area without collapsing, provided the soil structure remains stable.
Older cemetery sections deliver exactly those conditions. Burials in East Lawn’s historic plots are infrequent, mowing is minimal, and the soil goes largely undisturbed season after season. Separately, a peer-reviewed systematic review published in Conservation Biology found that cemeteries worldwide often function as refuges for urban biodiversity because they experience low soil disturbance, limited pesticide use, and relatively stable management over decades. That review provides general ecological context for why burial grounds can sustain rich insect communities, though it did not examine East Lawn specifically. The consistency of conditions at the Ithaca site likely explains why successive generations of bees have reused and expanded the same nesting area for what the Cornell team estimates to be well over 100 years, a figure based on the researchers’ assessment of site conditions rather than direct historical documentation.
What the numbers don’t tell us
The 5.5 million figure, while grounded in standardized methods, relies on extrapolation from 10 sampling points covering a combined 3.6 square meters of a plot roughly 1,600 times larger. Nest density can vary across a site depending on soil composition, drainage, shade, and root systems. If some sections of the cemetery support denser clusters than others, the true population could be meaningfully higher or lower than the published estimate.
No long-term monitoring data exist to confirm whether the population has remained stable since Fordyce’s 2022 observation or whether it swings significantly with annual weather. Ground-nesting bee populations are sensitive to spring temperature and precipitation. A single harsh late frost or an unusually wet April could suppress emergence in a given year without necessarily reducing the total number of nests in the soil. Without multi-year counts, it is difficult to know whether 2023 represented an average season, a peak, or a dip.
The “world’s biggest” label also reflects the limits of current documentation as much as the colony’s actual rank. Researchers involved in community science efforts to catalog ground-nesting bee colonies have acknowledged that most aggregations go unreported, especially on private land or in less-trafficked corners of parks and campuses. No comparable site has been measured with the same rigor, so East Lawn holds the record partly because no one has systematically looked elsewhere.
An uncertain future beneath the headstones
As of June 2026, no public statements from East Lawn Cemetery management detail current mowing schedules, herbicide use, or future land-use plans for the nesting area. The Cornell research team has described the site as low-disturbance, but the specific practices that maintain that status have not been formally documented. It remains unclear whether the cemetery’s operators intend to preserve the habitat, whether they fully grasp the aggregation’s scientific significance, or whether any conservation agreement is under discussion with local authorities.
That ambiguity matters. If mowing frequency, soil compaction, or chemical treatments were to change substantially, the conditions favoring Andrena regularis could deteriorate, potentially dispersing or shrinking the colony over just a few seasons. Conversely, if the cemetery and local officials embrace the site as a conservation asset, they could formalize low-disturbance practices and turn East Lawn into a model for pollinator-friendly management in urban green spaces across the country.
For now, the evidence supports a striking conclusion: beneath a quiet 1.5-acre plot of aging headstones in upstate New York, millions of wild bees have been building an underground city for generations, unnoticed until a single observant resident looked down at the right moment. The peer-reviewed field data, corroborating institutional reporting, and broader ecological research on cemeteries and solitary bees make the basic claim robust, even as finer questions about population trends, exact density, and long-term protection remain open. This small corner of Ithaca has become a rare window into the hidden scale of wild pollinator life, and what happens to it next will say a great deal about whether cities can learn to protect what they did not know they had.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
